The Club
Winter began. It rained constantly. This was the regular Vancouver weather: rain and rain again, and when one surely suffered from boredom, it rained some more. It only took a few minutes for one to get drenched. Just like today, when he was at the train yard on Drake Street, where they maintained the train engines of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, one of the biggest in Canada. It was so quiet that one could only hear the mechanics’ voices in the shop. The labourers outside were performing their duties to prepare the engines for another day before they would leave to pull the passenger train carrying passengers or the freight train carrying goods across this great land called Canada. These yard engines also needed their regular maintenance and there were times when one of those was parked on a line, waiting for its turn to get into the shop; and while the engine was waiting to get inside and get repaired the engine was on, burning fuel for hours on since as one mechanic put it once, it was better to have the engine running rather than risk of the engine being unable to start once shut off.
Mike was standing behind the fogged-up window and looked at the yard where the rain kept on dripping, steadily, quietly, poetically, he’d say, creating a sound, subdued sound, almost melodic, a sound of this world, a song one would sing, as the lone mechanic at the coffee house looked into the pages of a Penthouse magazine with the beautiful female bodies, almost naked, and his saliva was dripping out of his mouth. They had nothing to do for a while, until the three engines that pulled the passenger train arrived to get serviced…

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