Ducks Redux: Fueling Flames in Oil Land

By LM Shyba, CD Evans and Rich Théroux

In Ducks Redux, enviro-science grad Maeve Wong gets caught up in a bizarre revolution with unscrupulous lawyers and oil barons to take over the government of Oil Land. One love of her life lusts for climate activism and justice, the other for resource exploitation at all cost. She needs to decide whose side she is on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Durvile Publications
• Release date: Oct 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988824475

LM Shyba

In no particular order, LM (Lorene) Shyba PhD has been an entertainment impresario, magazine and book publisher, advertising art director, TV talent, digital art curator, university professor, and rancher, among other things. She was the innovator of the interactive performance piece Spies in the Oilsands and the serious videogame The Pipeline Pinball Energy Thrill Ride Game, which, together with her dissertation, won the J.B. Hyne Research Innovation Award from University of Calgary. She lives in the foothills of the Rockies.

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Copyright © 2019 LM Shyba and CD Evans

Library and Archives Publication Data

Shyba, LM, author

Evans, CD, author

Illustrations by Rich Théroux

Design and art direction, Lorene Shyba

Identifiers. ISBN: 978-1-988824-40-6 (print pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-988824-47-5 (e-book)

ISBN: 978-1-988824-48-2 (audiobook)

Special thanks to Colette Poitras, Cole Girodat, Melissa Aycock, and Austin Andrews for their keen observations.

Durvile would like to acknowledge the support of the Alberta Government through the Alberta Book Fund.

Durvile Publications Ltd.

UpRoute Imprint of Durvile & UpRoute Books

Calgary, Alberta, Canada

durvile.com

This is work of fiction. All the characters, names, entities, and venues in this book are fictitious, drawn from imagination, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales, is purely coincidental, neither intended nor to be inferred. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be produced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written consent. Contact Durvile Publications Ltd. for details.

This book is

dedicated to

Lorraine McVean

1. Sludge and Feathers

Keep your cool, keep cool, stay cool, don’t die here, Maeve snarls to herself as she weaves her lime-green pickup through a convoy of semis on the last stretch of freeway into downtown Oil Land. She’s driven all night from the oil mines work camp at Tailings Pond and is nearing the end of her mad-dash trip to Real Rush Energy headquarters. The morning sun stings at her eyes as she tries to focus between the juicy bug splats. Cool, stay cool. Words tumble in her head. Dead flippin’ ducks. I get blamed. Right!? I go down for this? Gravel rakes at her windshield from the bare wheel well of a jacked up Jeep. Or will my crisis training kick in? She hopes her crisis training kicks in but fears that she’s goin’ down.

Ducks lying dead at Tailings Pond, what a disaster. Her truck’s undercarriage makes a terrible rattle, must have hit a rabbit or something. Over the roar of the traffic and the tumble in her head of pitbull jaws snap me like a twig, Maeve steadies herself with a breath. She grabs her headset, punches at her jerry-rigged onboard phone system and commands, Dial Real Rush. Harry Jones.

Harry picks up her call right away. Maeve, ah—? He has no time to answer back when she shouts, No way those alarm horns coulda scared that flock off Harry forget it. Couldn’t get ’em set up fast enough anyway. Duck corpses everywhere. She swerves in and out the diamond lane and past a smelly livestock trailer.Yeah, flocks and flocks of ’em... banked and landed right on top of Tailings Pond, what a cesspool... what were we supposed to do? Flap our arms around at ’em and pray? God knows we tried. A merge moves her out onto the final Memorial Trail to town. What?? How can you know about it already? How did you find out?...What station?... You tell Mailcoat yet?... Give me five minutes, I’ll be right there.

Maeve tears off her headset and slaps down the sun visor, snatches at the same time for her aviator glasses and pokes out one of the lenses in the process. With one eye closed, she drives head on into the flaming sun toward downtown Oil Land. She’s got a pretty good idea that Harry will give JB the heads up about the dead ducks. Not a great mood setter.

Her breath sharpens into a rasp and she catches herself groaning in gasps and moans. Breathe, steady yourself. She punches at her playlist, takes a big breath and sings along to a song about calming down and not being so loud. Fat chance she can follow that advice.

It took three months with Real Rush to figure out that Lucas was right all along — she’s selling out. She’d told him, I’ll do a great job at Tailings Pond, then you’ll see, I’ll dazzle JB Mailcoat and his Real Rush directors with those renewable energy experiments we’ve been testing, you’ll see. Lucas said without a trace of empathy, You’re kidding, right? That pitbull will eat you alive.

When she accepted the job, Maeve thought she’d be working in the lab, combatting climate change through renewable energy but instead, JB assigned her to chase wildlife away from Tailings Pond. The dazzling presentation she’d planned was likely to turn into don’t fire me, I have to pay off my stupid debts. Nothing I did kept those ducks off the toxic water. Don’t you believe me? As she heads towards the inevitable crunch with JB Mailcoat and his snapping jaws at Real Rush headquarters, she drives and chants, keep your cool, Maeve. Pull yourself together. Do not be afraid.

At that same time, JB Mailcoat, President and CEO of Real Rush Energy, cracks his morning cola and kicks his scuffed cowboy boots up on the shiny walnut desk. He surveys the corporate landscape of Oil Land and the shining mountains that stretch beyond the walls of his glass palace on the 38th floor. As he sucks an errant morsel of breakfast steak from between his teeth, he reflects on how much easier life would be if there was a big ocean out there, dotted with oil tankers instead of peaky mountains and stacks of unused pipeline.

JB pries his thousand-mile stare off the sweeping horizon and swings his long legs up and away from the top of the desk and onto the floor with a thud. A flurry of dog whines and scratches from a blanket under his hobby table in the corner of the room prompts him to hurl a big rawhide bone in the direction of his black lab Lucky, who jumps out at it from across the Persian rug with a rip and a salivating snort. JB reaches out to scratch Lucky behind the ear, drawling out Who needs a harbor, Daddy needs a harbor, and Who’s gettin’ a raw deal? We are, but a rap at the door provokes barking and lunging that knocks JB off balance, upsetting both his train of thought about needing harbors, and the pile of coins he had stacked up on the corner of his desk.

A muffled voice from behind the big oak door says, Excuse me, Mr. Mailcoat, um, twenty-five hundred dead ducks, um, Tailings Pond—

JB, momentarily distanced from his aura of command, slides around on a sea of collapsed coinage as he grabs Lucky’s collar. Harry Jones opens the door a crack, saying, We may be facing a disaster.

What do mean, disaster?

That’s what Dr. Wong said, JB. I’m just repeating —

Listen, Harry! JB strides across the room, points a square finger and yells out. Chernobyl was a disaster. Fifty rigs out five hundred days hittin’ fifty dry holes is a disaster. Little girls talkin’ global warmin’ is gettin’ up there. He stamps his foot. Who is this Dr. Wong anyway, calling this a disaster. Dead ducks ain’t nothin.’

As he punches at the television remote, Harry answers, Yeah, I’m with you, JB. The channels flip from the twangy country music channel to JB’s default favorites: the Fishing Network, ESPN, and Modern Miracle News. He looks up to see JB scowling. You’re pushing on an open door, JB, on a scale of one to ten, dead ducks is a minus one hundred and ninety-three. Harry, besides being a pretty good slide guitarist and a native Oil Lander, is a world class suckhole.

Okay, Harry exclaims, Here’s the coverage, on the Veritable Network. The screen springs to life with images of dead and dying ducks and a news ticker that proclaims AntiTox’s discovery of the catastrophe. JB, true to his hard-stubble cow ranching and oil patch roots of Texahoma, swings into crisis mode. So what are you people doin’ about these ducks. Tell me. Right now!

• • •

Maeve pulls her muddy truck up in front of the Real Rush Building, flips on the hazard lights, jumps out, flashes her lanyard at security, and catches the elevator up to the 38th Floor. Struggling to control her hammering heart, she closes her eyes and a scene from the stinking mire of muck comes flooding in. In her head, she has the courage to remember­— oil-soaked duck, bewildered, trying to scream, flapping crippled wings and tail feathers. Ding. 14th Floor. Grabbing the desperate thing, slipping and sliding in the filth, scooping it up. The poor creature spraying ooze all over me. Ding. 25th Floor. Oh God, the ooze is still all over me! I must smell like a cesspool. Ding. 31st Floor. Lucas — pirouetting out by the busted air cannon, holding his camera up over his head, connecting with the Veritable Press satellite. Lucas, Don’t rat me out. Please!! Shouting Sorry Lucas. I’ve whored myself out to Real Rush Energy and now I’m in deep. Don’t rat me out! Do you hear me? I don’t want to go down for this! Ding. 38th Floor.

Maeve slides past the inner sanctum secretarial sentries, gorgeous in their stiletto heels and butterfly false eyelashes, spots the bronze door plaque reading JB Mailcoat CEO, and barges right through. She’s covered in grease, her hair pulled back with a motorcycle bandana and coveralls rolled down to her waist, exposing a tar and feather-smeared Tapperlite Folk Festival t-shirt. Lucky, the dog, thunderstruck by her appearance, retreats to gnaw on his rawhide. Hey, so far no pitbull, just a black lab. She thinks. Not kind but not deadly either.

JB spins away from the television, reeling with the twin realization that shareholders’ investments are in jeopardy and that there is a strange, disheveled FarEastern woman in the office. He yells out, Harry, goddammit, who the hell is this?

Harry, tripping over his words in his haste to defuse the situation blurts out, JB, this is Dr. Maeve Wong, our new environmental scientist. We hired her away from post-grad field work at the copper smelter disaster down in Tapperlite. She can give you some of the, um, some of the—

Yeah. Spit it out Harry, Some of the what? snaps JB.

Maeve, not wanting to further embarrass anyone, interrupts with, Good morning, Mr. Mailcoat, sir. She removes her oily glove and extends her hand but JB just glares at her. Maeve recoils her hand, using the motion as a chance to reach into her coverall pocket for her phone. The screen brightens up with sad pictures of dying ducks. She holds the phone up to JB’s face saying, Sir, birds died. Lots of birds. This isn’t the first time either. With a click and a scroll she finds the stats she is looking for. Records show that between four hundred and fifty-eight and five thousand and twenty-nine birds died last year after landing at Tailings Pond.

JB is, on the one hand, appalled at one so unfeminine — like a Silk Road ninja, no makeup, holy shit — and, on the other, impressed that she had come to them from the copper mine smelter disaster zone. Listen, lady I heard it all before. Duck hunters shotgun thousands a’ ducks outta Oil Land skies every year— Maeve wants to wind up and give him a stiff kick in the butt with her steel-toed boot, but instead chants to herself stay cool, survive this life, don’t die here. JB is still yelling, "...a hellava lotta feathers hit the deck all kinda ways. A couple a’ thousand gettin’ a messy death at Tailings Pond? Not a big deal."

While he is yelling, she bites her tongue, leans over to pick some coins up off the floor and stacks them back up onto the coffee table in what she hopes is perceived as a demonstration of cooperation. But JB isn’t finished. Raising his voice to the feared heights of admonishing pitbull he continues. I heard wind turbines nail over ten thousand birds a month. And what do you think them AntiTox types serve at their annual piss-ups? Roast dead duck with orange, I’ll bet. Look lady, we’re not talkin’ about dead babies here!

The problem is, JB, Harry interrupts. The problem is that with Dr. Wong’s guidance we’ve made dramatic improvements to our bird-deterrent system—

JB spins around and yells, So why the hell don’t they work? He kicks the waste basket across the room and the office fills with an earsplitting clang. Maeve looks over at Harry and sucks in her cheeks, hoping he interprets her exasperation.

Harry says, The problem is, JB, this new duck incident has made headlines again around the world only this time it’s Real Rush and not our competition that’s between the crosshairs. Videos of oil-drenched migrating ducks are going viral. It’s a nightmare.

Maeve perceives that Harry is making the problem worse rather than better. She says, Mr. Mailcoat, sir, let me explain. Birds land on the pond water. They think it’s a lake but there’s oil on the surface.

Lady, whose side are you on?!

Sensing an imminent blowout, Harry thinks of grabbing JB another cola but instead scurries over to the office wetbar and delivers him a shot glass of Cuervo Gold. The tequila brings JB back to memories of Panhandle cantinas and dirt tracks to remote well sites. His eyes reflect a fleeting moment of calm.

Harry takes advantage of this to explain, You may recall the shareholders’ annual meeting? Questions were raised about the ponds? That was when the committee of concerned shareholders suggested Real Rush have ecologists and environmentalists monitor the wildlife?

JB hurls the empty shot glass at the trash basket, only to have it bounce off the side, hitting Maeve’s carefully constructed tower of coins and peppering Lucky with a ricochet of rebounds. The dog whimpers and slinks over to Maeve who pats him and whispers, I’ll bet you don’t like gunshots either, hey Lucky, or fireworks.