The Cellphone's Dead

They ran across the street, he paid for their tickets, and they boarded the train. It sped under the downtown core then shot from a tunnel and ran along fifty feet or so above East Vancouver. Drizzle fell from the grey plastered across the sky, making the concrete and blacktop shine, and they looked down on it as the rails sang underneath the cars.

The train stopped and its doors hissed open. A South Asian woman brought on her little girl, but the girl got away from her mom and tried to escape the car. Joe lifted his foot and she climbed up and clung to him as if he were an uncle, until mom scooped her up. The woman sat down with her child, and then pulled a tiny, silver phone from her pocket, flipped it open, and gazed at its pale, blue screen. Joe stared at the woman using her phone, and Alma nudged his ribs.

“Amazing things,” Joe said. “They used to be the size of a freakin’ brick.”

Alma frowned at him. “You’ve seen a cell phone before.”

“Not before I got back.”

“Come on. You’re kidding, right?”

He tipped his head to the side. “Well…”

“You don’t need to tell me tales, Joe. Right?”

He turned to her. “Sure, I know, Alma.”

“So?”

He took a breath. “I know.”

“Did you tell your dad your story? What did he say?”

“He’s had a hard time, not knowing what happened to me, and mom… dying. He looks a lot older now than he used to, and I think old injuries have caught up with him. He used to be strong, man.”

She sat back in her seat. The train sped eastward. On the slope above the track mills and warehouses stood, fantails of steam rising from their stacks.

“I worked on that building,” Joe said, pointing.

To the south lay a wide plain of warehouses and river tributaries and in the distance, rising in the mist and rain, a pair of giant tuning forks stood by the Fraser River, supporting a span of concrete over the water.

“That bridge, too,” he said, grinning. “It was my first job, straight out of punk school. The foreman was an Indian. He had a label on the back his hardhat saying ‘Custer had it coming’. Fuck. I was scared that first day, walking a greasy beam littered with hose and tools, kegs of bolts, pavement a couple hundred feet down. Stumble on that fucker and you’re dead. But I did good. They put me on the raising gang.”

“The raising gang?” she asked, eyes wide.

“Yeah, the kings of the job.”

“The kings.” She grinned.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “That was a cool job.”

“You did well,” she said.

He stared forlornly at the bridge in the distance she took his hand in hers. “It can’t be as bad as all that,” she said.

They took the train to the end of the line and were the only ones in the car when they got out. They walked down the concrete steps to the pavement; she looked without enthusiasm at drizzle falling on the parking lot. A new glass tower stood there, glistening in the rain. He touched her shoulder and pointed right, to the older houses on the hill gently rising from the station.

“That’s where my Dad lives,” he said.

And now the Cellphone's Dead