Core Values Read online

  “Fire hits Buncor’s cat-cracker,” he began in his best Rich Little does Walter Cronkite impression. “For the second time in two days, emergency alarms rang at Buncor’s Lennox refinery Monday. Crews battled a fire in the cat-cracker unit around 6:40 p.m. The all-clear was sounded three hours later. According to spokesperson Anton Valeur, monitoring of the site perimeter revealed no off-site environmental impact.”

  His sister and father sat on the other side of the table in the visiting area. In the other end of the room; a five-foot tall, shuffling lady in a housecoat and slippers kept telling the nurse, ‘I wanna go home.’

  Bru watched the nurse lead her away to give her another pill. She had been doing that for hours.

  “Are you okay?” his sister Diane asked. “How have you been feeling?”

  “I’m pissed off,” he announced. “But they have to let me out in three days.”

  “Did we bring the right books?” Frank Brubaker asked.

  “They’ll do. You brought enough books, and that’s all that’s really important.”

  He thought for a moment.

  “I’ll lose my job, of course. Willy will have to find another helper,” but what really hurt was being stuck here. “Willy’s got that church job to finish.”

  To have your freedom taken away; and your dignity, your very freaking humanity.

  “You’re not supposed to take this kind of thing personally,” his sister advised. “Have a nice rest and take things easy for a few days.”

  Biting back the ‘fuck you’ reply, he tried real hard to keep silent.

  Resentment seethed in him. It was all that miserable son of a bitch Oberon’s fault.

  “That little bastard LaSally harassed me for fucking three and a half or four years, and that son of a bitch Sergeant Oberon and his crew always made out like I was paranoid and delusional.”

  It led him here. It was that God-damned dispatcher’s fault; as much as anything.

  “You should have seen it,” he told the old man. “In the elevator, there was a nurse, two cops, two security guards and an orderly. When we got to this floor, and they all walked out, I just stood there and watched them all walk off up the hall. I had to call them back!”

  Bru was smiling and ruefully shaking his head

  “I said, hey! What about me?”

  His dad grinned. Knowing Bru, he wouldn’t put it past him.

  “The worst part though, was when they made me strip and put on this freaking backless, topless, strapless, neck-less, frontless, shirtless piece of shit on,” he griped. “No curtains on the damned windows. All these freaking people in the room. I was really pissed off, and I started stripping and throwing my clothes down on the floor between them and me.”

  Bru was pissed off because he had a right to make a phone call.

  “Not until you put this on, sir!” the nurse kept telling him.

  What a fuckin’ joke.

  No wonder people hated doctors, cops, and the like. Brubaker was sick and tired of being violated, again, and again, and again.

  “Oh, dear,” said his sister, colour rising in her cheeks.

  Bru was funny about his feet.

  “Did they make you take your socks off?” his pa asked.

  He nodded glumly.

  “There I stood, buck naked, with all them idiots staring at me,” he said in a low voice.

  Bru was in a very dejected state of mind.

  “Actually, it turns out I could have used the bathroom,” he admitted. “I never really thought about it! But a padded cell has to have its own bathroom, otherwise the staff would always be running back and forth.”

  “Oh, my God!” gasped Diane, covering her mouth with a hand, a half-laugh in her voice. “Did they really put you in a padded cell?”

  “It’s not really padded,” he said. “But the head of the bed is a couple of feet from the wall, so an orderly can restrain you, and there are actual fuckin’ straps on it.”

  It wasn’t all that funny.

  How have I been feeling?

  He was trying to read the next story that caught his eye.

  “How have I been feeling? When I wake up in the morning, the first thought that goes through my head is; ‘I have to kill myself.’ When I go to bed at night; the last thought that goes through my head is; ‘I have to kill myself,’” he said. “That bastard harassed me right out of my home, and now all of a sudden, I’m the crazy one.”

  Chuck was suffering a kind of depression that sucked at his soul, and never let him rest. A depression going back years. He had suffered through a year and a half on the borderline of suicide. Brubaker worked very hard to get that house, and to keep it.

  And for what?

  Some obnoxious little prick comes along takes it away again. Bru had suffered depression before in his life, but it became absolutely chronic when he bought that damned house. Years had gone by. Too many wasted years.

  “Now the cops got me down as a mental case, and I have no fucking rights at all,” he concluded, feeling the corners of his mouth pulling down insistently, and his face begin to tighten up again.

  He could feel his jaw jutting out and beginning to work from side to side. He had no control over his own jaw anymore.

  “Argh.”

  He growled deep, deep in the chest and lower throat. Yes, Brubaker was pissed.

  Really fucking pissed.

  She patted his arm and he put his face to the paper.

  “Bad things happen to good people, Chuck,” she said gently. “You know we still love you, no matter what happens.”

  “I’ll sleep a lot better knowing that,” he muttered.

  “We’d better go,” said his father.

  His old man began the long process of standing up. Diane looked upon him with sympathy, noting the irrepressible gleam in Bru’s eyes.

  “Would you like us to come see you? Tomorrow night?” she asked, reaching for her purse and keys.

  Diane was as tall as Dad, he marveled, although eight or ten centimetres shorter than him. It was always a shock to see her beside a person of normal height. All the Brubakers were tall. Her shoulder-length brown hair was limp. She was tired. She’d had a long day and now this.

  “Nah! I’ll be fine. I’ll just eat in my room, sleep a lot, and read books,” he decided. “Thank God they didn’t stick me in the ward.”

  * * *

  He watched their backs retreating and wished he could walk out too. But it would just cause too much trouble; and for what? They’d keep him in longer next time. He so hated seeing the pain in his father’s eyes, and he supposed, the wonder in their eyes. The doubt. The doubt. A kind of half-acknowledged shame. A kind of shame you couldn’t be proud of, and wear like a badge on a uniform.

  The sheer look of bewilderment on dad’s face was heart-wrenching.

  “Does he have time to eat his supper?” and the smell of home-made spaghetti sauce wafting out of their tiny kitchen.

  “I’m sorry sir, he’ll have to come with us,” was all the poor cops could tell him.

  “Please don’t handcuff my son. He doesn’t need that,” his ma’s tragic dignity, not concealing a kind of terror.

  “My son,” she wept.

  “I love you too, mom.”

  Two cops in his old man’s living room.

  The female cop stood there looking up at him.

  “We’re not judging you, sir.”

  Goddamn you all to hell.

  ‘My brother—the mentally ill person.’

  ‘And what do you do for a living, Mr. Brubaker?’

  “Fuck you. God damn you al
l to hell,” he said into empty space.

  At that exact moment a nurse came into the room to straighten up the exercise mats or something and he felt kind of rude about that. Pretend to read the paper.

  Reinforcing it to them was a bad idea.

  “Air pollution and disease linked,” he told her hindquarters as she worked in a half-aware manner.

  “Oh?” she responded.

  She twitched one corner of her face in his direction. She was pretty, and on the high side of thirty-five, even.

  He noticed, and went on.

  “A U.S. study identifies a link between airborne particulate matter and cardiovascular disease,” he read aloud.

  He was trying to imitate Wolf Snitzler but found it hard going.

  “This should interest readers because Lennox area residents breathe some of the worst air in the country.”

  “Uh, huh. That’s true,” she said, digging in a cupboard.

  “Nice to get some independent verification around here once in a while,” Bru quipped and she giggled a bit.

  She found what she was looking for and headed out of the room.

  ‘We have seen a dramatic increase in the number of bad air days,’ according to Dora Benouchi, an occupational hygienist at Lennox Health Centre. ‘It represents a very real health hazard for those with respiratory and heart problems.’

  Brubaker quickly absorbed the rest of the article, the gist of which was that in a study commissioned by the environment ministry, Lennox was the city with the highest levels in the entire province in terms of ozone and fine particulate matter, the prime constituents of smog.

  According to Dr. Ram Bamtankumam’s report in the September 2009 issue of the Magazine of Chemical Investigations; ‘Small particles of pollutants less than one-tenth the width of a human hair might trigger blood clots. By studying the effects on mice, researchers concluded inflammation of the lungs leads to death from cardiovascular disease.’

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” he muttered.

  He had plenty of time on his hands. The paper was a prime source of intelligence about the enemy. In a sense; Brubaker was always working. Always on duty, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter days a year. Considering he didn’t get paid for it, and got damned little satisfaction out of it, he considered giving it up sometimes.

  Even as he read, he was thinking up his next stunt.

  Chapter Eight

  Lennox was a small, grimy, northern industrial town…