Cedarbones

Chapter 10: First Day on the Job

At 5:20 am, Shelley sat on the steps to the trailer house acting as a mobile HQ for Bergmann Forestry Services, LLC. Her dad’s beat-up and scuffed silver thermos sat on her right, filled with piping hot coffee. On her left, her dad’s work lunch box – an aluminum affair with two metal latches and a collapsible handle on the top. Two salami and cheese sandwiches lay nestled inside along with a plastic container of cherry tomatoes, a bag of Old Dutch potato chips and a large bottle of lime Gatorade.

She took a deep breath and bobbed her feet against the wrought iron staircase. She still didn’t know if this was a good idea or not. Her dad was right. She’d probably get more leads swilling 7&7’s at the VFW and the Legion.

In the east, dawn pressed its periwinkle way above the tree line. The last of the crickets creaked out their songs in the dew-laden grass before the sun silenced them. The musty aroma of damp class five gravel hung in the air. To the west a pair of headlights moved towards her. As they grew closer, so did the distinctive growl of a diesel engine. Before long a Dodge Ram 2500 with dualies turned into the gravel road and stopped near her. The gagging diesel fumes followed it. Shelley picked up her thermos and lunch box and stepped down from the stairs. Ellie Schultze exited the truck and walked through the headlights; her hand outstretched to Shelley. “You must be Ove’s daughter,” she said.

Shelley fumbled her thermos into the crook of her other arm and shook Ellie’s hand. “Yes, ma’am.”

Ellie laughed. At least ten years younger than Shelley, Ellie sported a sturdy but athletic frame. Her boots bore the scuffs and duct tape repair of someone who believed in running something into the ground before paying for a new pair. She wore jeans with patches in the knees and frays in the cuffs, as well as a thread-bare flannel shirt under a bulky Carhart jacket. “No need to call me ma’am, ma’am,” she said with an embarrassed smile. “You prolly know more about this than I do.”

Shelley shook her head. “Spotty work in a few summers does not make me a logger. I’m more of the raising chickens in a Minneapolis skyrise type.”

Ellie snorted at the self-assessment and walked back around to the driver’s side. “That’s crazy.”

“More than you know,” Shelley said, opening the passenger side door and climbing into the truck.

After seatbelts, Ellie gassed the truck and spit gravel behind them. The truck motored up a slight hill, its headlights illuminating the land to the left and right of the logging road. Each side emerged barren and stubbled. Stumps pocked the landscape for a mile out. It still amazed Shelley. It seemed too hard to level an entire forest like this. She remembered the photos her father showed her as a child of the old timer loggers. The time without the machines. The long, two-men rip saws. The axes. Oxen dragging trunks out to the wagons. But today, she imagined this was like one or two days’ work with the right crew and crawlers. The truck bucked and bounced over the rutted road.

“Gonna be a bit rough for a bit,” Ellie said. “We kinda mess shit up with the big rigs. You’ll get used to it.”

“It doesn’t bother me.” Shelley clutched her thermos and kept her eyes out in front of the truck as the sky grew brighter in the morning. “Listen, Gunnar told me to let him know if any of the crew got to in my face.”

Ellie laughed a bit. “You cold-cocked your ex and his mistress in a restaurant. I figured you could handle yourself.”

“I spent a year in jail,” Shelley said. “It wasn’t fun. I just want to stay out of their way.”

“We got a lot of roughnecks,” she said. “Gunnar believes in second chances, you know.”

“Sure,” Shelley said.

“Larry Jenkins stole some cars,” Ellie said. “Tom Degutter did some time for domestic abuse. Jimmy Nilsson, also domestic abuse. Todd Hopkins, indecent exposure. And Karl Magnusson. He raped a girl a while ago. Been clean ever since.”

As the truck bustled through ruts, Shelley rolled the crew names over her tongue and flung them into her memory. She could avoid the car thief and check fraud. Domestic abuse? That played with her theories. Indecent exposure a maybe. But rape. That checked all the boxes.

“Gunnar says you can run a skidder,” Ellie said.

Shelley snapped back to the conversation. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s been years, but it’s like a bike. It’ll back back, right?”

Ellie shook her head and laughed. “Right. I can give you a quick tutorial. Pretty simple really. The fellers will knock ‘em down. You just claw them up and haul ‘em to the loaders.”

“Sounds easy enough.”

Ellie parked the truck at the top of a cleared hill and they both got out. Shelley held tight to the handles of her thermos and lunchbox in each hand. Below the hill, semi-trucks idled with empty log trailers. Each trailer had a claw arm attached to the back, where the loaders would claw up the piled logs and stack them on the trailers. A delimber sulked near to the trailers, it’s great metal tube hoisted above its cabin, ready to strip the felled trees of the branches. Scattered throughout the mile wide clearing sat three mulcher rigs ready to grind up the two dozen piles of clipped branches from the previous day’s work.

The ridge behind them stood thick and lush with ash, Norway pine, oak and poplars. The rising sun cut rickets between the trunks and gave them first light. The thick scent chipped wood and bark roamed along the hilltop, coupled with grease and diesel exhaust from the freshly fired-up feller bunchers and two skidders. The fellers had treads and big boom arms up front with a vertical claw like a fist with a massive saw blade on the bottom. The operator literally moved the boom, grabbed a tree with the claw and the blade at the bottom severed the tree from the trunk at the ground. Once cut, they just swung the trees to the side and dropped them for the skidders to haul away. And skidders were just big loaders with horizontal claw attachments on the front and big gnarly tires.

It was any kid’s dream. Playing with their Tonka trucks and toys and getting paid for it.

Ellie led her over to one of the skidders. She pointed out the men climbing into their feller bunchers. “These boys will be knocking them down.” Then she pointed out an older fella climbing into the other skidder. “You and Karl. You’ll be skidding.”

Shelley eyed up who she presumed was Karl Magnusson. His large viking-like gray beard. Patched up work boots. Stained, baggy jeans. Thick flannel shirt. Trucker ball cap. His face wrinkled and tanned. Beady eyes that sat sunken and weary in their pits in the man’s face. A self-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips. He climbed into his skidder like a clothed orangutan. Shelley squinted her eyes. He looked about the same age as the vets.

“Skidders are pretty easy,” Ellie said. She walked over to the unmanned skidder and patted the cold steel of the machine’s cabin. “Get up in there and I’ll give you a rundown.”

Shelley lifted her thermos and lunch box up and into the cabin, then climbed up the metallic rungs and sat behind the controls. The machines had improved since she was a child. There was still a throttle pedal on the floor. But the two levers now had joystick controls with numerous thumb buttons. And where there used to be a key to start the beast, there was an array of diagnostics for hydraulic pressure, gas, heat, and such, plus a wide, round plastic switch for starting.

“Hit the red switch to fire her up,” Ellie said.

Shelley listened and activated the skidder. It shuddered and rumbled to a start with a growl.

“The pedal on the floor hasn’t changed much,” Ellie told her over the noise of the engine. “Rock the pedal forward, and the rig moves forward. Rock it backward-”

“And you go in reverse.”

“You got it,” Ellie said. “The levers are a bit different. You still pull them back to turn. Pull the left lever, turn left and such. The buttons on the left joystick raise and lower the loader boom. The buttons on the right joystick swivels the loader claw left and right. Trigger on the left joystick opens the claw. Trigger on the right closes the claw.”

“Seems simple enough,” Shelley said.

“It’ll take a bit to get it down pat,” Ellie said. “But before you know it, the rig will feel like an extension of your own body. Start out moving one tree at a time. When you start to get cocky, you can try and grab a stack. Haul them down the hill and dump them at the delimber machine. They’ll take it from there.”

“Sounds good,” Shelley said.

Instead of walking back to her truck, Ellie strode off up the ridge and climbed into the last feller machine and fired it up. Around her, the operation kicked into gear amid the screams and screeches of the feller blades and trees crashing into the ground. She likened it to seeing an army of ants work together, but from the ant’s perspective. Giant trees were clawed, sawed and felled in seconds. The whole effort seemed surreal and unnatural like a man-made forest fire, but it moved on unchanging. When Karl’s skidder skirted around her, four trees clamped in his rig’s maw, Shelley remembered she had to do some skidding herself.

She rocked the pedal forward and her skidder lurched up the hill. Her first tree took five minutes to secure in the claw and another five to carry it down the hill to the delimber. The controls moved stiffly under her hands and feet. After three or four trips with single trees – and seeing Karl outpace her with four to five in his claw – Shelley grew irritated at herself. She decided stick closer to Karl, not just to keep an eye on him, but learn some technique. She noticed he didn’t claw at the trees from above. He lowered his claw boom flush to the ground, like a forklift, scooped them up and rocked them to the back side of his claw. His maneuavers were swift and agile. Lower the boom. Flush the claw. Scoop. Then rock them back. He plucked trees off the ground like one would sticks in their yard. And when his maw was full, he closed the claw, swung his skidder around and gassed it doen the hill to the delimber.

Karl was one hell of a skidder.

Shelley gave it a try. Rocked the pedal forward to a tree. Lowered her boom. Flushed the claw to the ground. Scooped up the tree. Then with a couple taps of the right joystick, the tree fell to the back of the claw mechanism.

Holy shit. It worked.

She gassed it to the next tree and repeated the process. Then to the next. Then another. And another. When her maw was chocked full, she pressed the trigger to clamp them in and she swung her rig down the hill. Ellie was right. After awhile, when the controls become second hand, it felt like the skidder became an extension of her body. Once she dumped her load off at the delimber, she spun around and headed back up the hill. As Karl passed her, he nodded in her direction, put his index and middle finger against his forehead and saluted her, in the way good old boys do to each other.

The morning sped by and Shelley forgot the entire reason she was there. Her skidder became one with her, and her one with it. Around her, the gnash of metal sawed through trunks, ripped branches and bark, and shredded every last bit of scrap into mulch. She could identify the trees being processed by the smell. Citrus like pine. Rusted nutty oak. Loamy, earthen poplar. When she was unloading below, the fellers on the hill moved like locusts munching down a field of oats. Trees rattled against the claws. Vibrated with the saw. Then toppled like a spent prize fighter.

From high atop the hill, a horn blasted five even roars. And like a game of tag, each other rig blasted their horn five even times until the riot rang down to her. Karl tugged on his horn and blasted five times. So, Shelley repeated the same. At once, all the rigs crawled back up to the base camp, where Ellie had dropped her off. When the rigs congregated, their engines were turned off and the crew clambered out of their machines like spiders approaching their prey. Only these spiders were armed with thermoses and lunch boxes. Shelley then understood the five blasts: lunch time.

She climbed down from her skidder and sat cross-legged in front of her skidder claw. Her stomach gargled beneath her flannel shirt and she didn’t dally long before opening her lunchbox and tearing into a sandwich. Between bites, she spied on the crew. Tried to pick the abuser from the car thief and fraudster. But who was she kidding. Those were the small potatoes. She needed the big fish. The rapist. She had to know his story.

“You mind if I join you?” a voice asked, startling Shelley.

She shielded her eyes from the midday sun to see Karl Magnusson standing above her – a small cooler in one hand and a cheap, foldable lawn chair in the other.

“Um,” Shelley hesitated. “Yeah, sure.”

Karl flipped his chair open and grunted down into the seat of it. “Sorry, if I don’t join you on the ground. My knees just can’t take it anymore.” He opened his cooler and fished out a thick sandwich with left over hunks of roast beef and a jar of pickled herring. He dipped his fingers in the jar and pulled out a few pieces of slippery fish and popped them in his mouth. The air between them grew sour with vinegar and brine. After he bit off hunk of his sandwich, he shewed and spoke around the cold, dry meat. “You’re Ove Skarstaad’s kid, right?”

Shelley took a long pull from her Gatorade, nodded her head and said, “Apparently, my reputation precedes me.”

Karl took in a deep breath between another bite of his sandwich. “Reputations are like shadows. Can’t get rid of them and they usually show up on the sunniest of days.”

“I can relate,” Shelley said.

“That’s real nice necklace you have,” he said. “Looks handmade.”

Shelley lifted the Algiz pendant and dipped it back inside her shirt. “My mother made it for me.”

“She did a damn fine job,” he said. His face tensed up in awkwardness and continued. “If you don’t mind me asking, how much time did you do?”

“Just a year,” Shelley told him. “Aggravated assault. You?”

Karl took another breath and looked up into the sunlight, watching a few puffy cumulus clouds drift by overhead. Then he dropped his head and stared at his shadow elongated on the ground between them. “Five.”

“You don’t have to tell me anymore,” Shelley said. “I hate talking about it too.”

He bit off more sandwich and tried to work out a smile. “Don’t matter none anyway. Everyone in this crew and this town know. And I’d understand if you’d want to skitter on outta here. Sometimes its best that people see the shadow before the man. I raped a girl.”

“Shit,” Shelley said.

“Not a girl, girl,” he clarified. “She was a woman. Penny Johannessen. We just turned eighteen. Met at a friend’s party. We both got drunk.” He opened his thermos and poured out some coffee and drank it. “We ended up in a bedroom with our clothes off. Things got heavy. She smelled like sugar cookies. We had already gone so far, but she said no, and I was too young, and too stupid. Unable to control myself. I just…kept going.”

“My dad says it only takes seven seconds to change your life,” Shelley said.

“Sometimes less,” Karl said. “If you want to pack up and lunch with the others, I’ll understand. But I’ve done my time and paid my price.”

Shelley shook her head. “I’m fine. Really. What did you do after? Just join this crew? Family? Own any muscle cars?” She couldn’t believe she just dropped that in. Muscle cars?! How does that just pop into conversation?

Karl laughed. “Muscle cars?”

“Sorry. My ex was into muscle cars,” she lied.

“No,” he said. “No muscle cars. Or family. I enlisted in the Army and served for 10 years after. To be honest, I hoped to get myself killed for what I did, but I never saw any action. Came home. Joined Gunnar’s crew.” He took off his trucker’s cap and rubbed his hair, then put the cap back on. “I heard Penny had a child. A daughter. Never figured out if she were mine, but I always wondered if I’d be a good daddy, after all I’d done. Most days I imagine she is mine. Put stories and lies in my head about how things could have been, if I hadn’t been so dumb. But I tell you what, even those little lies changed how I think. My choices. If she were mine, I’d want the world to be better than the world her mother had. I know that much.”

“It sounds like,” Shelley said. “Despite the shit you went through, you came out okay on the other end. I hope I can too.”

Karl drank the remaining coffee in his Thermos cup and said, “You seem to be doing alright. You haven’t clocked me yet.”

Shelley laughed. “Who else up here served in the Army around your time?”

“What fer?”

Taken aback, Shelley thought about it, trying to cover herself and her inquiries. “Ever since getting back, I want to focus on my father more. I missed too much. I want to know what he went through.”

“Ah,” Karl said. “Most fellas don’t like to talk about that shit.” Karl packed up his cooler. “But hell, most guys my age around here served – either enlisted or drafted. Don’t know if you recall, there was a war going on back then.”

“I’m aware.”

Karl thought about it. “Off the top of my head. Geoff Haugen. He used to work in the lumber outlet. Hank Ibsen. Used to be a fishing guide. Derek Gunderson. Former city councilman. Ivor Hall, the barkeep at the Gunflint Tavern. He saw some time. And don’t forget Sheriff Vollen. He got drafted.”

“The sheriff?” Shelley asked. “I didn’t know he served.”

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