A graveyard shift meant time and a half, but she would have worked these January nights, flooding the park rinks, for regular pay. She worked alone and liked the peace of it. In the small office attached to the skaters’ warming hut, she kept a Thermos of heavily sweetened coffee, her new radio/CD player, a few magazines, and a horror or romance novel, neatly packing and taking them home in a duffle bag when the shift ended in the morning dark. Friends would ask if it didn’t get lonely. Sure, at times, but if you have to be alone at night anyway, you might as well be working, earning time and a half, instead of alone in bed.
And working alone saved fuss — dealing with the bosses, or co-workers who always had a grievance to share and wanted you to take their view. Ellen got along fine with them, but they often vexed each other, and who needed to be around that? She’d always found it natural to get along with people. She didn’t understand the general crankiness of the world. Often it seemed easier, if not exactly preferable, to be alone now. In earlier jobs, she’d had bosses peering over her shoulder all the time — often touching her shoulder, in fact. That groping had died out some years ago, and she didn’t miss those confidential hands, though she did sometimes miss the looks, all the candid, famished stares that had helped define her teen years and early twenties. Still, she’d never found it as hard to be alone as some of her friends claimed to. If you got along well with people, you got along with yourself. She believed that as a general rule. In a sense, she was well made for this stage of her life. Look at it that way.
After her first hour or so, flooding the shinny rink and the children’s oval, she would come back into the office to warm up while the ice set. She would unzip the front of her black snowmobile suit and slip her feet out of the big Sorels and prop back in the conference chair by the space heater, sipping coffee and reading. Tonight it was The Shell Seekers, and she would read a good half of its 582 pages before dawn. Harlequins had bored her for some years. No substance, no surprise. They kept you company for an hour or so and then evaporated, leaving no trace. As for horror novels — these freezing nights, nobody around, were just designed for them. She liked Thomas Harris and H. P. Lovecraft, and lately she’d been rereading early Stephen King.
Depending on the night’s coldness, after an hour or two of reading under the lone fluorescent tube she would turn the water back on and pull on her wool gloves and, over them, a pair of industrial rubber gloves and go out for another round of flooding. Her third or fourth round, near dawn, would finish the night. It took at least three really cold nights to get the rinks up and running in each park, and then there was plenty of maintenance, night and day, after that. This park, unofficially Skeleton Park (it had been the city’s main cemetery through the 1800s), was her favourite. She liked its office, preferring the firelike, toasting heat of the space heater to the electric baseboards in the other, larger offices. And this was pretty much the part of town where she’d grown up. It was changing, of course. Students and young professional types were moving in, renovating the old rental properties enclosing the park on four sides — the handsome Victorian redbricks that gave the park a sort of phony, respectable frame, since just beyond were hundreds of smaller places on narrow yardless streets, much aluminum siding, low apartment blocks of bile yellow brick. She was raised in one of those smaller houses and had skated here as a child forty years ago.
Technically, she still had a boss, but out here she never had to deal with him. Not that he gave her a hard time. They got along. He was a short, fit, swaggery man of about thirty who had once had a tryout with an nhl team, she could never remember which one. He treated her like one of the guys, to the point of using “man” — while not exactly calling her “man” — when speaking to her. Sure thing, man. Man, I wish I could tell you. You want Skeleton Park this winter, man, it’s all yours. Maybe he preferred to think that anyone so much bigger than himself, and possibly stronger, must be a sort of man. Ellen was not only sturdy — her ex-husband’s backhanded term — but tall. She came from a side of town where most women thickened dramatically in their thirties and before long outweighed their men. The men thinned to sinew, and their faces got a wrinkled, redly scoured look, as if the skin had been worked with sandpaper, while their eyes grew raw and haunted. Ellen had been spared the puffy moon faces of her older sisters, only to see her features grow meaty and masculine, while her body consolidated, almost doubling itself, like a hard-working farm wife of another time.
Her husband had left, seven years back. No children. Gavin had never wanted any and now she supposed, accepted, that it was too late. She was forty-six and she no longer registered on men. The many she worked with — almost all of the city’s outdoor and maintenance staff were men — were genial and respectful and she never felt so invisible as when they were around: robust, vital men, and they addressed her like a buddy. Or talked about women in her hearing. Maintaining the rink during the days, seeing the boys play shinny or smaller children chug around the oval in their wobbling circuits while the mothers sat watching, cheering — that could get to her, too, of course. Being here at night was better, all in all.
The past few nights, she wasn’t even alone. On the far side of the low-boarded shinny rink, a man was standing motionless under a lamppost by the icy asphalt path. He’d been standing there for three nights. His back to the rink, he was facing the twenty-five-foot-high limestone obelisk that dominated this end of the park. He was not dressed for the activity. He wore a baseball cap and a short brown leather jacket, blue jeans, construction boots. It was about fifteen degrees below zero. He’d spoken to Ellen during the first night’s flooding, while she worked the northwest corner of the rink — close enough for them to talk with slightly raised voices. She’d been waving the hose head back and forth, layering water over deepening ice. Now and then he would take a step or two toward the obelisk, pause, then resume his stiff stance. He seemed to be sighting on the thing. Later, a few steps back, a step to the side. She watched out of the corner of her eye, not especially concerned. The park was known for odd spectacles. It was a sort of open-air hostel for addicts, parolees, halfway house residents, psych hospital outpatients, a shifting population of mainly harmless eccentrics.
He’d veered his head and looked at her over his shoulder, fast, a pitcher checking a runner at first base. The visor of his cap kept his face in shadow, but she could see his beard, light coloured, neatly trimmed. He had good shoulders, a nice build.
Have you ever seen a miracle? he asked.
Here we go, she thought tolerantly. Then, in a cordial tone, more or less the tone she used to broach any conversation: It all depends what you mean. You warm enough out here?
It has to be moved, he said. His voice was mild, reasonable.
What, the obelisk there?
It’s a tombstone. They resent that it’s here. It weighs down the dead.
You’ve been talking to them?
His head tilted slyly. Let’s just say that I have heard from them. There are twenty-four thousand of them. The dead are more visible than we are.
