things move around

Marathon is full; there is no room at the Zero 100 Motor Inn, to which we have decamped from the Travelodge. The woman at the desk asks if two of us, Billy, Grant and I, would mind sharing? We stand in front of her like moai. I wait, hoping Grant will speculate as to her intake of crack cocaine, but come to my senses and tell her yes, we would mind. So the resolution of the conundrum is deferred until the arrival of the next guests, and will be deferred again by them, and squeezed, like a reluctant blob of toothpaste, along the tube of evening until the final misfortunate maintenance crew rolls up.

For this is why Marathon is full, why the Travelodge is full, and the Harbour Inn, and the Zero 100 Motor Inn, and every other inn and barracks and manger in Marathon: the pulp mill is shut down for annual maintenance. From all over Ontario and beyond, a rag-tag band of maintenance men have converged on this small town on the back of the leaping tiger that is Lake Superior.

And I don’t see why, if Jesus is going to visit this world again, he shouldn’t choose this point in spacetime for his reincarnation. In a trailer round the back of the Wayfarer Motel, a female maintenance man, marginally less hairy than her male equivalent, leans back in a tiny bathtub, sweat gluing her mangy locks to her shoulders and face, pushing, while her crewmates drink beer and talk hockey, and say “Christ, you sure are taking your time in there”; and around this time three wise men show up in town, but these three wise men are idiots, guided not by a star but by the crazed commandment of a deranged maniacal direktor, and bearing not gold, but platinum corporate visa cards, and not frankinsence but roll-on deoderant, and not myrrh but a bottle of the roughest vin rouge Canada has to offer and two cans of stout.