Over my dead body.

9 LOOK AT THAT ONE, MAKING A SCENE

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Char insists that it’s the onions planted in the yard whispering that, but she’s wrong. I hear it, too. And I know Mama’s voice, her words, her loving guidance when I hear it, even if it sounds like onions. There’s more than one way to skin a cat. More than one way to stop a pack of rat bastards from wrecking what we hold near and dear.

The poor buddies Sarah Spenser brought in from Alberta to start prepping the site didn’t know what hit them. They couldn’t figure out why things went missing, week after week. Keys, saws, lunches, toilet paper from the porta-potty. And when they’d see Brenda Baker out for an early morning stroll up the woods road with her hunchback mother Flossie, they’d smile and wave. Just as they’d all nod at Dulcie Cooper when they’d see her down in the ditch at dusk, filling a Sobeys bag with cattails. And of course, they’d humour Shirl Short with polite, protracted conversation every time she showed up, asking if they were up there smoking weed on the job and offering them tea and squares.

The transplanted cowboys couldn’t figure out why their truck and dozers wouldn’t start either. The odd fella with the tattoos and curled arm at the garage and the Alward boys who clearly know their way around big machines both had the same response when they took a look: they’d scratch their heads and say, “Jeez b’ye, I think your [insert obscure mechanical piece name here] is shot. I can special order that. Gonna take a while.” But all the special order parts in the world won’t help when there’s a half a Sobeys bag worth of sugar being dumped into your gas tank on the regular.

When they finally concluded that the gear was being tampered with, they tried to get the cops involved. But ever since Officer Duke got transferred, the local cops aren’t interested in paranoid stories of industrial vandalism out on the Middle Rear Road. So, Spenser Mining Inc. tried to hire a private security guard, not realizing that most of the guys in that business were friends of Cracker Parsons. And God love Cracker, he’d already put the kibosh on anybody working for them Come From Aways out to frack up Crow Fortune’s land. In the end, Spenser Mining Inc. paid a sketchy young guy named Weasel Tobin Jr. ten bucks an hour to do the job. Until he started coming to the boss with stories of a half-naked, wild-dreadlocked, snake-dancing woman flitting around in the woods during his shifts. Clearly, the guy was drunk and on drugs just like his old man they heard, so they fired him. Nobody else would take the job.

On the bureaucratic end, things should have gone a bit smoother for Spenser Mining Inc. After all, they have a long history of greasing the paperwork wheels by lining politicians’ pockets. But somehow every piece of paperwork got hung up. Or lost. Or both. Exactly how does a stack of such important documents end up behind a radiator, in the ladies’ washroom, or in the janitor’s closet? In the wrong building. If you ask everybody’s favourite little paper-pushing Natural Resources Department bureaucrat, Becky Chickenshit, she’ll tell you she’s never seen the likes of it in her life. And with that precious baby bump, and her slowly brightening eyes behind her thick-rimmed glasses, who’d have the heart to hassle her about an errant paper pile or two, after all she’s been through?