The Time Lord
By Mack McColl
Copyright 2021
Prologue
He stopped at the stop sign and looked both ways before turning left and accelerating the little car on the highway leading south, 250 kilometres to Campbell River. He had no time to waste. Barry looked down the long stretch of highway in front of him and sighed. He was sober, and that didn't happen often these days. Never, in fact. He made the trip alone. Tripping on a highway was part of an old modus operandi.
He drank coffee from Petro-Can and smoked a joint so the car reeked. The little dark red compact was practically invisible as dusk was upon him. He kept it slightly over the speed limit. The road was dry. It had not rained today in the temperate rainforest. Traffic was sparse, practically non-existent, at twilight. He switched on his headlights but they did nothing to light the way at this moment except allow oncoming cars to see him.
She stood like a sprite on the side of the highway under street lights at the corner of Sayward Junction an hour into his journey. She looked hyperactive bouncing on her toes when he stopped. She continued to stand on the side of the highway, arm dutifully extended, as he skidded to the shoulder and reversed to pick her up. She stood beside her little bag of shit. He flung open the passenger door. She must be the stubborn type.
At last she appeared with a huge head of rust-coloured hair. She was short and trim and healthy-looking but weathered, tired in the eyes, as she glanced at him and shoved her bag in the back seat. She climbed in, clearly suffering in the cold autumn air. She was harrassed about Sayward, she said. She was sick and tired of being abused, she said.
He didn't want to hear any sorry tales about Sayward. He wanted to talk about himself being a certified and bonifide Time Lord. It's according to his birthdate and how it fits in the Mayan Calendar. “And do you know what a Time Lord has to worry about?” “Not a fucking clue.” “D-N-A,” he said, with a snigger. They rolled toward the small mid-island city of Campbell River where he looked for the Oceanside Route, a branch of older island highway, to take them south along the Inside Passage.
She continued to share a few choice words about a recent experience in Sayward, kept calling herself a fucking jippo, whatever that is. Said jippos don't take no shit like that. Jippos move along. “And sometimes there's a trail of blood,” she said, and cackled. Barry thought about DNA again.
He planned to stop in Black Creek, “Saratoga Beach, actually,” to buy a large bag of weed. He said he's going to meet his friend Bob and have a few drinks so Barry asks politely if she would like to come along.
“Is he a Time Lord too?” she said.
He reached down between his legs and grabbed the flat side of a pipe wrench and swung in one motion heavily into her face.
She screamed, of course, the women will do this, and he struck a lesser blow to the back of her head and wheeled the car to the shoulder of the highway with pipe wrench in hand. She slumped against the door. And she was out. Dropping the wrench he reached over and locked the door. He stayed stopped beside the highway for a moment to help her slump further in the seat then pulled back onto the highway with a shoulder check. It was darker. Safety first.
He found a turn leading west up the valley on the north side of the Oyster River. The headlights showed a decent gravel track until the road climbed gradually out of the forest to become a lesser road, more of a trail into a vast clearcut watershed. There was light snow at this higher elevation, and no tire tracks. He found a clearing, a loading site or turnabout for trucks, and dragged her out to lay her on a blanket in front of the car. He fucked her in the vagina and came quickly. He leaned back on the hood of the car and smoked a joint in the clean, oxygen rich mountain air, gazing at the dark, spying a few forlorn silouettes of trees, watching the stars sprinkling the heavens.
He went to grab a spotlight, a chainsaw, and a shovel from the hatchback.
Chapter One - What Fucking Time Is It?
He stood on the toilet in the bathroom. He was barely woke enough to realize it was nighttime and wondered why he was stuck in this position. Shouldn't he be in bed? Excuse my language he thought but what fucking time is it? A sudden searing pain tore through his midsection and he was unable to breathe. He went out at the sharpness of the pain and missing air.
His 8th birthday came and he was at the centre of a big party. He was at the playground with a group of friends, and they were happy when the cake and ice cream was opened on the picnic table. There was a number of Native Indian kids in the party. Barry liked the Native Indian kids. They were friendly and playful and grateful, fun to be around. It was a mix of people and this kind of thing happened more than you might expect in a place like this, his mother might say. In fact, she would say, it happens much more often than not where she comes from too.
The only white kids were his older brother Terry and Terry's friends. There were enough soccer balls and baseball gloves anyway. Barry was playing soccer with friends on this fun day during which he was happy, ecstatic, so many wonderful feelngs and feelings frozen in time, forever pictures of a brilliant moment. Barry became happier than he could imagine when his dad's brand new red 1962 GMC pick-up truck came around the corner of the park gate into the parking lot. His dad walked across the field carrying his guitar box, "Daddy!"
All the children in the party turned to see Barry's dad wearing a great big smile walking across the field toward the picnic tables and Barry was instantly jealous, and he broke into a sprint to run and meet his father. "Time for music!" his father called. He brushed Barry's head with his hand, “Happy Birthday, my boy!” and he walked to the where the hotdogs were gonna be cooking shortly in a firepit.
A circle formed immediately around his smiling dad sitting on the folding chair, smiling, laughing kids sitting in a circle on the grass, a few yelling with joy while his dad fiddled with the strings, reaching to adjust them repeatedly. "You need to tune a guitar," he explained, "after carrying it in the truck for a few days."
“Even when it's a new truck, Daddy?”
“Yes, Barry, even when it's a new truck,” he said, proudly.
The sky was sparkling blue and the sun was hot as well as bright this Saturday afternoon in early June. His tummy was grumbling for fire-roasted hot dogs and cake. Why not cake first? Every boy and girl was happy to hear the sing-a-long begin, only a few older boys remained on the soccer field. "Old MacDonald had a farm, E-I-E-I-O," was first.
His dad sucked in the whole crowd before embarking on a set of songs, "Row Row Row Your Boat, Gently Down The Stream," gesturing to the kids to pick it up and shout the words, pointing to the lake and looking a little crazy-eyed, honestly, as he led the park in a rousing rendition of Frere Jacque. He played other songs the kids didn't know. Johnny Cash was a favourite of his dad.
Barry's mom led the clapping and his dad belted out the songs. Barry sat close to his dad, jealous of the kids with him and wishing he was the only one to sing with his dad. But he was the only one touching him and rocking beside him and the strumming guitar. The kids roared, and it was a darn good time. But the hour of singing passed too soon. His dad received a bunch of hugs from the boys, and even kisses from the girls. His mom gave his dad a last cup of coffee while he packed up his guitar. A few scattered clouds had cooled the park on this June day.
Barry believed his birthday marked the beginning of summer for his family. This time of year saw his dad working extremely hard in the forests with less time for tinkering inventively in his large shop. His dad was a forester, his job was to harvest trees and have them delivered to the mills around the region. He talked a lot about trucks and mills. Barry's mom liked to tell people her husband Frank Higginsbottom was the best forester in Northern British Columbia, in a region full of them, she would say.
Barry knew things were good with his father who was surrounded by admirers, children and adults. Barry was growing up with lots of toys. Barry's was a brand new soccer ball the kids are kicking on the field. Barry wore new shoes and new clothes and during winter he and his brothers had new sleds, and hockey skates that fit, and gear. His dad was generous to kids who needed equipment. He was a regular visitor to the local outdoor rink where he shoveled snow or flooded the ice with a giant hose, or painted the lines and circles on the hockey rink. These were community events and Higginbottoms were part of it. Barry was fairly sure community was important. Here in the beginning of summer he reflected on the beginning of winter because he was happy in the late nights helping paint the lines and holding the heavy hose to flood the rink, and Barry knew his dad's effort, holding the frozen hose, breathing out clouds of steam to hang in the air, filled an important role in place of the “useless deadbeat fucking part-time janitor,” the town hired each winter to maintain the community centre. Frank was like that, a monument to human kindness and higher values standing alone on the ice waving the big hose back and forth.
Everybody loved his dad for doing the work on making a great community centre in town. His dad spent money on buildings like dressing rooms with big woodstoves at the centre. Teams from other towns would change from boots to skates and troop in and out on the cold nights. It was cold in winter but some nights were colder than others. Barry had learned to skate as fast as his wobbly legs would carry him, but Terry was the hockey player in the family and a recognized team leader. Gordon was too young for this activity and stayed home with their mom most of the time.
Barry's dad packed away the guitar, "Got to go back to work!" he bellowed, and Barry figured this meant his dad was going to the hotel to meet friends and people who worked for him. Frank Higgensbottom was a guy who mixed business with pleasure with everybody in Berns Landing. Barry knew his dad was a popular guy, but also an important one. He had friends and many weekends when he came home from the bar he brought a crowd. Barry's mom loved the parties on the weekends and she had lots of food prepared, and Barry's dad had what he called a well-stocked bar. There was lots of singing and a few guitars. In summer, the parties were in the big fenced backyard until the late setting sun was gone. Even the neighbours joined in the fun, and never complained, they were welcome, nobody complained and everybody got along.
In winter the parties were in the large front room of the big house, and all night men and women climbed the stairs to use the bathroom. It was noisy and sometimes hard to sleep for he and his brothers but it was fun, and everybody was laughing and singing until the parties' end, nobody was shouting in anger or fighting. Barry believed there would be an outside party tonight and he might be able to join in, it was his birthday after all.
He circled the firepit and enjoyed the music. More than one guitarist was in the group and usually this was the case. There were breaks, people talking and drinking, barbequed steaks and bowls of potatoes, and he loved the smell of meat cooking. The night fell even as the light at night stayed so much longer and Barry was allowed to mix with his mom and dad's friends and he was excited and restless, not tired in the slightest, when his mom took his hand and led him away with his dad singing Folsum Prison by Johnny Cash.
The pain stabbed his behind and he was wide awake and looking down at his feet from an exalted position standing on the toilet seat. Blood was running down the inside of his legs as far as his knees on both legs, he was standing but felt like he was floating above the seat of the toilet, airborne, but still rooted on something holding him in place and he began desperately squirming to wiggle away from the pain, which sort of stopped. He looked around and remembered it was his birthday, but at the moment it seemed it was over. He whispered, "I want to play guitar and sing like Daddy."
He wiggled away from what pierced him behind and he reeled on the toilet and looked up to see his father wearing what looked like a mask. It was not a smile. It was an awful look. Barry glanced down at his father's blood covered penis big like a sausage and Barry struck a fighting pose, like a boxer, "You'll never do this to me again!" he screamed, He was spun sharply, a hand smothered his mouth and nose, ''No!” his father barked at him, “I'll do it whenever I want. You won't play any fucking guitar and sing any fucking songs. You're too fucking stupid!"
The air was trapped in his lungs by the big hand covering his mouth and nose and Barry blacked out. In the morning he awoke to a different awareness of life. He wasn't a great skater like his brother Terry. He wasn't a great runner like so many of the kids in the field at his party. On many instances he got there first to kick one for his team but missed his chance. He began to prefer to watch others play and felt life was unimportant. There seemed to be no future for him. He didn't care to apply himself for his teachers when school began in the autumn.
"I hate school."
"But you love to read," his mom replied. He began calling her Louisa.
"I am mom," she insisted after a few times. As Halloween approached and the weather grew colder he thought about the hockey rink. He decided you couldn't pay him to paint any fucking lines on the ice. When he received a new pair of skates at Christmas he didn't even try them on. When he reached puberty the rapes of his ass stopped. He continued to live in the sleep walking mode and started smoking cigarettes and stealing booze, and chasing girls, especially the pretty Native Indian girls and there was a lot of them and in no time he was fucking them, and when he had what they told him was his 17th year he became a father. So he quit school and obtained a job bucking trees in forestry clearcuts. He learned quickly to handle a chainsaw with dexterity. He continued to sleepwalk in a marriage with Ruby. Time did not move. He was stuck in cement or he was a walking statue but looking closely time had not budged from the moment he discovered his father sodomizing him on his 8th birthday. As a result he felt 8 years old and like he could do nothing right but at the same time he could do no wrong.
But one thing he promised himself. If he couldn't help his brother Gordon, who was probably undergoing the trauma as we speak, never would Barry's son have to endure that pain, the indignity, the damage. The questioned remained, how to break out of 8.
Chapter Two - The Decadent Forest
Barry worked hard at his jobs in the forest. Him and the millions upon millions of buzzing insects. His chainsaw blended perfectly with the omniscient hum one heard in the heat of the day on a forest floor during the spring, summer, and fall of the year. Barry had had a few jobs. First he was employed at the loading site where trees were dumped to be loaded on trucks. He was working around the equipment to learn the industry from the ground up, he told himself. Delimbers, grapple skidders, feller bunchers, stump grinders, mulchers, yarders, forwarders, log loaders, harvesters, and self-loading trucks.
Barry's dad was a university educated RPF, Registered Professional Forester. Everybody on every machine answered to somebody like Frank. Barry dropped out of school when Ruby was pregnant. It's not because he was stupid. He was an excellent reader and he loved a dictionary. But he hated authority and the structure of school. Meanwhile he was entirely at home in a clearcut, or a library. His older brother Terry was being educated. He was going to university and studying the business side of forestry, dollars and cents in making money from the trees harvest of trees.
Instead of continuing with education, Barry decided to educate himself. He often heard his dad talk about the condition of forests. The word 'decadent' was used to describe large tracts of forest that had been overlooked by harvesters. The province of British Columbia was a huge land mass and it was impossible to manage the millions of square miles, or kilometres, of forest. Foresters wanted healthy trees and turned their backs on trees that didn't fetch the big dollars in the mills.
No forest ever grows in a contiguous mass, although a few monocultures had been planted on an experimental basis in a few districts of the province. His father said forests burned down in thousands upon thousands of acres and new forests grew naturally in place of the old. But other forests grew old, and aged unimpeded by bugs or fires to become dying trees, to become a condition known as decadent. It was Barry's favourite word.
Decadent: [ˈdekəd(ə)nt]
ADJECTIVE
characterized by or reflecting a state of moral or cultural decline.
"a decaying, decadent Britain"
synonyms:
dissolute · dissipated · degenerate · corrupt · depraved · louche · rakish · shameless · sinful · unprincipled · immoral · licentious · wanton · abandoned · unrestrained · profligate · intemperate · fast-living · sybaritic · voluptuary · epicurean · hedonistic · pleasure-seeking · indulgent · self-indulgent.
Damned harsh judgement on those forests. But accurate enough. Decadent forests and the insects in profusion consumed everything, including themselves.
Therefore to Barry's way of thinking the people who went into the wilderness and cut down millions of trees were serving a variety of useful interests. A healthy forest in this region in the northwest of B.C. contained spruce, balsam, alder, and pine trees. Tightly spaced. Dense undergrowth. There were small pockets containing cedar and these lived longer unless they were marked for harvest. Yes many of these forests had been harvested or burned and when they grew to about 40 years old they were supposed to be cut.
Barry aspired to machine operation loading trucks. He pined at wanting a machine under his ass because the job paid okay. But there was no future in it for him. He caught wind of rumour spread that he was too reckless to drive trucks or operate machines. He blamed Ruby for some reason. She hated his driving and especially his boat driving. Machine operators blow out their backs by middle age. The future for Barry lay in falling trees selectively or en masse with a chainsaw. In this area of the province this was a ground level job. None of these trees grew large enough for topping, a major skill in forestry involving trapeze and climbing trees. He never did any tree topping. His task was to follow a path cut by a chainsaw and cutting trees inside a block designated by green ribbons around trunks. The trees were not massive coastal rainforest elephants needing to be topped. Mostly they were 30 to 50 year old lodgepole pine, spruce, and smaller fir trees. He became obsessed with learning about the length of life in his midst.
"Drunk again?" Ruby stood, blocking entrance at the backdoor of the house. They rented a small house in Berns Landing, which he was thinking of buying when he was old enough. The baby was coming upon what they told him would be his third year of life. He backed down the porch and climbed into his pickup truck and went to the hotel tavern. He was underage but the tavern manager accepted his false I.D..
Barry belonged in the bar where he had fun. His main thing was discussing the study he had made on the lifespan of living things with the other drinkers. "How long does a spruce tree live, Barry?" "Until I come along," he paused, "to cut down its decadent ass," he replied, wearing what he knew to be a sly looking wry smile. Raucous laughter would ensue.
"How long does a moose live, Barry?"
"Until I shoot it through the heart." And he would gut the animal and bathe its blood. The fellow forestry workers in the hotel tavern had no idea this high school dropout who maintained a rather stupid persona had spent the first two years of his married life in the town library reading about the life span of living things. He studied the age of things.
Life wasn't so much a precious thing, he decided. It was a time span. His time maybe standing at a dead stop but every living thing must be on a path from beginning to end. It must be a straight forward affair, one step after the other until it was over.
"For example," he would say, after the fourth round of pitchers of beer, "the common housefly known as musca domestica will live up to two months, but I have one of those bug zappers so in my house there are no old flies." Laughter abounds.
"But it's actually 120 days when you count the larvae stage, maggots, the pupa stage and adult stage."
Out in the bush it was the horse fly that commanded the most attention. "Oh, those live to be 60 days as an adult, similar to the house fly -- " he slurred.
"No kidding? They're so much bigger and meaner," said Don Swan, a big man of mixed origins, Indigenous to Canada and Ireland.
"Oh tell me about it," Barry rejoined. He had returned to the bar after the painful and seemingly endless rejection by his wife. He had not actually seen his son for days. He was dropping off cash to Ruby for household expenses. She used a diaper service. She was breastfeeding but the boy was beginning to eat pablum. He watched the bottles accumulate in the garbage bags on the back porch, and no matter how drunkenly he lived the garbage was taken out.
"What's the difference between a deerfly and a horsefly?" asked one prescient fellow logger, a Native guy who was incredibly agile with a chainsaw, one of the members of the separate community who accepted Barry's commonlaw marriage to Ruby. "I don't reckon I know that, Marcus. Maybe the colour. They both bite like hell and they both live a long time, 60 days as a adult, as much as three years in all stages."
"Fucking amazing."
A housefly buzzed around the table full of draft beer. Four beer drinkers gazed drunkenly but with new insight into the multitude of flies buzzing around the room.
Barry got up from his chair and was soon weaving back from the bar whipping the house fly swatter. "They get big and clumsy as they grow older," he smirked. One middle aged fly landed on the table and died a split-second later and everybody laughed drunkenly, a kind of revelry to raise the spirits of every soul in the room. Moreover every fly should be informed the beer on this table is not to be disturbed.
Another passtime Barry pursued on a more or less avid basis to avoid the common-law marital bliss was fishing. "How long does a fish live?" asked Marcus, in a supercilious fashion, Barry surmised (a word he would never say at this table). Marcus had an imperious nature he inherited from family on the coast. He referred to his uncle who talked in circles about Indian warrior societies, including their cannibalism. Fascinating. Not the sort of thing you normally brag about. Barry thought about the hours he spent with his nose buried in dictionaries and books, studying the etymology of the English language, also the entomology of things consuming the waste he created. He treasured his hours as a full fledged autodidactic.
"What kind of fish, Marcus?"
"Well I know a salmon lives six or seven years," his friend replied.
"Some trout live a long time, several decades if they're lake trout," he said. "Rainbow trout live seven years."
"When are we going fishing, Barry?" Don Swan asked.
"I dunno. I have stuff to do at home." Everybody laughed. It wasn't supposed to be funny, but he decided he too guessed it was. Before most young men in polite society had found their way into a loss of virginity, Barry was failing at a marriage.
"Okay let's get a couple cases of beer Friday night and go out on the lake in my boat this weekend." Barry had a 12-foot skiff with a 9 HP engine and a trailer but he normally left the boat floating on a dock belonging to the town of Berns Landing. He bobbed his head looking once more around the tavern, gazing over the empty terrycloth covered tables as there were but a few hardy drinkers left at this hour.
His dad walked in the front door and gave him a wave as he walked to the bar to buy a box of cold beer. The light was dim in this yawning room, but dim was only dark in the corners. Barry had a lit smoke hanging out of his mouth. His dad knew better than anybody in the joint Barry was sitting illegally in the establishment that had a minimum age of 19. He knew better than anybody his son was fully grown, driving his own vehicle, working the entry level eschelon of the timber game. He had his own little family which he was obviously neglecting, and Barry considered this a rather large step above the callous and mercilous treatment of his family that Frank should be known for, but isn't. His dad was in no position to judge Barry's late night antics. One thing is for sure. You wouldn't find Terry lounging about at midnight in a Berns Landing Hotel tavern.
The three-storey wooden structure, the most imposing structure on Main Street, would be closed soon. "How long does a moose live?" "Didn't somebody ask me that already?" Barry said, as he waved to his dad and watched him leave with a box of 12 cold beer, not an unusual occurrence on a weeknight .
"Was that your Dad?" asked Don Swan.
"I believe it was. He's going home to play his guitar for a few friends," Barry assumed out loud.
"Twenty-five years," he said, and gathered himself to try for home. To keep his mind off the possibility of being stopped by the RCMP, he resumed thinking about lifespans of animals, dogs, anywhere from 9 to 15 years depending on the breed. He didn't have a dog but he wasn't opposed to having one. Maybe Ruby would like to have a dog, however most Native women were not so inclined to have them as pet. More often dogs fell under community property, running around captive to the Indian Reserve like everybody else. Berns Landing was surrounded by Indian Reserves, a sort of amalgam of Indian houses and tribes thrown together in part of the government effort to commodify the people into a larger collective called the Nation of Canada, and it wasn't working out very well for the Native Indians, far as Jerry could say.
This little Indian girl lived off the reserve in a house with this recognizably white guy who climbed the three wooden steps at the back of the house and entered the door as furtively as humanly possible, although he knew he was too drunk to maintain a silent entry.
There was a bowl of cold, watery canned beef stew on the table and stale bread lightly buttered and a bottle of beer with a bottle opener beside it on the kitchen table, and the beer was chilled. Ruby and baby had gone to bed. It was a shock, he divined, as he gathered the blankets around him on the sofa, that a Dall sheep lives only 10 years. But then maybe they shouldn't be climbing so high, and he chuckled to himself quietly.
