In any case, we’d then turn on some music. Elvis, usually, but sometimes Bill Monroe, or Willie, or Waylon, or Hank, or Merle. Those were our guys, with Elvis at the top of the pyramid. Elvis before he got drafted, mostly, when he was just that Memphis mama’s boy with a hickwise rumble in his getalong.
One night, when I was feeling flinty—the slightest little thing would hit me and break off little bits of my armour—Connie, out of nowhere, went, “You gotta take me to Graceland before I go, babe.”
I said, “Naw, I’ll take you to Graceland to celebrate when you get better.” Then I had to leave the room so she wouldn’t see that I was crying.
But most of those nights there’d be no tears. We’d get the music going, and I’d drink and she’d smoke, and we’d laugh. After putting her to bed, I’d pour myself some rye, a double, and put that back pretty quick. Often I’d have another—a triple. Then I’d fall asleep on the couch. In the morning I’d clear the fog with half a pot of coffee, before getting Connie up and fed and medicated.
Then it’d be time to care for my units.
***
My first was a Scout. I really only got it for hobby purposes. Back then I was mostly doing weddings, as well as a few small local contracts: brochures for a funeral home, a florist, a website for a dentist who’d just set up shop in a strip mall by the highway. I was getting by, but just.
At some point, I’d heard about people using UAVs to take photos, and that dovetailed beautifully with how much I loved playing with RC cars as a kid. I used to tape the family Handycam to the top of a 1:8 scale dune buggy and send it over jumps. Dad was less than enthused about that, but it was hard to argue with the results. One time I pointed it sideways and had some friends keep pace on their bikes. That was pretty impressive. “Like a real movie,” Dad said, before he clapped me on the ear because he noticed the lens was scratched.
So I ordered the Scout. The moment UPS delivered it, I tore it open and plugged it all in to charge it. Maiden flight was in the yard, just to get some practice under my belt. It was a scorcher of a day, mid-June, high blue sky.
Connie, who’d been sleeping, wandered out onto the deck and found me hovering the thing ten feet off the ground, out above where the septic bed made the thick grass a deep, rich green. “Looks good,” she called.
“Thanks. You’re looking pretty good today, too.” She still had her hair then, looked like she could put on a blazer and go stand behind the bank counter again. “Feeling okay?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, and waved her hand around like she was conducting the youth orchestra. “Tired.”
And it was true that she was kind of drawn in, a bit frail—but it was nothing like how she came to look later on. Before long, her hair would be gone and her skin would look like a shirt she’d been wearing too long, her eyes like someone had pressed their thumbs too deep into something gone bad.
After I’d practised manoeuvring the Scout a half-dozen times, I packed it in its black case, put it in my truck, and drove it down the road to where the Rideau’s South Branch cut under Dennison. I relaunched my new toy in a clearing, got it up to about fifty or sixty feet before having it swoop down the creek and back.
The HD images coming over my tablet were some of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. A smooth, clean, panoramic view of the green earth, the bending brown creek, and the horizon stretching toward the trees. It was more real than real, and in that moment everything clicked home. My jaw must have hit my knees.
Here it is, I thought. My future.
I flew the Scout around for another twenty minutes, zipping it over my head, doing enormous figure eights. It was a gorgeous, cloudless day. The sound of the rotors as it got near—a purring, seductive whirring—might as well have been the sound of my heart. Soaring, dipping, climbing, veering. Then I brought it in, landed it smoothly, and pointed the truck home to share my new excitement with Connie.
I found her on the bathroom floor, puking her guts out.
***
In short order, I’d set myself up as the go-to guy for aerial photography in Eastern Ontario. This had everything to do with my early adoption. I didn’t need a helicopter. I had a helicopter in a suitcase. You wanted high-quality aerial footage of an event or location? Call Kirk Bedell. Tell me your needs and we can talk rates.
I got a call from Richard Aiello, a real estate guy who did a lot of high-end properties. He was based in Ottawa but would take listings from all over.
“I have properties that photos don’t help,” he said. “I need something bigger.”
“You want video?” I said.
“I want you to use your little airplanes to get something amazing. I want blockbuster visual drama. I want people to watch a video and say, I have to live there.”
“I can do that,” I said. Then I had to figure out how to do that.
We—Georgia, Seb, Connie, and myself—were sitting around the kitchen that night over the remains of a pizza. I told them about Aiello’s call.
“So what are you going to do?” Georgia asked.
“I’m going to meet him and I’m going to take all kinds of video of wherever he wants me to take video.”
“Okay.”
“Then I’ll edit it.”
Seb said, “Do you know how to do video editing?”
“No,” I said, “do you?”
Seb shook his bald head like a big, dumb Lab.
“Well,” I said, “figure it out and you’ve got a job.”
And I will be damned if Seb didn’t figure out this video-editing thing fast, and well. Georgia lent him some money for a new laptop, and he got some software for it, then he sat me down and showed me what he’d done with stuff he’d scoured off YouTube.
“Seb, seriously? You did this?”
“Yeah. You like it?”
“You’re hired.”
Aiello had us meet him at some million-dollar hobby farm near Merrickville. Forty acres or whatever, right on the river, fields and paddocks, big stone house, tree-lined drive. When we pulled up, he was standing next to his black Infiniti, feet spread wide. He was wearing a light blue polo shirt with his name and little personal logo on it. Black slacks, loafers. We shook hands, and the gold bracelet on his wrist jingled like sleigh bells. The skin on his face was soft-looking, like kid leather. He had these fleshy lips that he kept pursing and thick hands that he rubbed together, non-stop, as if he enjoyed the way they felt.
“This property has been on the market ten months,” he said. “You’re going to help me sell it.”
“Sure thing,” I said.
“Convey the grandeur,” he said to me, raising his arms.
Seb unpacked and set up the Scout. I launched it whirring up into a perfect blue sky, then swooped it, taking long, gentle paths over the mature trees, across the fields, up the green, shaded lawn.
“That’s a great toy,” said Aiello.
The images coming in on the tablet were astonishing. It was like the opening shot of a Hollywood epic. Oscar-worthy. I flew the Scout around and around. Walked slowly after it, awed by how beautiful and smooth it was as it buzzed around through the air, but trying not to let on just how amazed I was. Time passed quickly, and I really had no idea what I was doing. I figured, Kirk, you get a whole whack-load of footage, and then deal with it later. So we kept going and going, me balancing my fear that Aiello would see me as green against the fear that I’d miss something, some aspect or angle on the estate. I needed to hit a home run on the first try. I could see Aiello deciding to make this a regular thing, and I needed a regular thing.
Finally, after we’d shot and shot, I landed the unit and we packed up. Aiello shook my hand with his right while squeezing my shoulder with his left. He squinted and puckered his fleshy lips and said, “I can’t wait to see it.”
Seb and I sped back to the house and loaded the footage into his laptop’s editing software. I hovered for twenty minutes and then Seb said, “Maybe you should go get us some beer. I
think we’ll want to celebrate.”
I liked his confidence. “Okay. You have to do your thing. Is there anything I can do? Can I be useful here?”
“Tits on a bull,” Seb said, and looked at me with his sad, brown eyes.
I made myself busy around the house for an hour. When I came back into the kitchen, Connie was standing behind Seb, looking over his shoulder at the laptop.
“Kirk, look at this,” she said to me, without taking her eyes off the screen.
“Babe,” I said, “you feeling okay? You shouldn’t be standing so much.”
“I’m great. Just look at this, will you?” she said.
“I’m not done yet,” said Seb. “Don’t get crazy until I’m done.”
“Give the man room,” I said to Connie. “Get in your chair, take a load off. I’ll make dinner. How about carbonara? I know Spielberg here will be hungry.”
The water wasn’t even boiled yet when Seb said, “Done.”
I crouched behind him. Connie shuffled in and stood behind me, put her hands on my shoulders for balance.
“You ready?” Seb asked.
“Yeah, yeah, play it.”
He hit Play.
The video started with Aiello’s name and logo and website, then faded into treetops racing by, shot from above. The music—I don’t even know. If I’d heard that music anywhere else, I’d have hated it. There was a wash of fake strings and this bubbling sort of beat, like a drum machine had been thrown in a swimming pool. Horrible. But in context—with the shot rising over the trees and the house coming into view, its long drive snaking off-camera, then the tan metal roof, then the fields beyond, ending with a little sliver of the river—it was breathtaking. I mean that literally: the music took my breath. As though it had been composed for just that purpose. It made everything feel beautiful and urgent, and it made money feel insignificant, like I could just give everything I had to live in Aiello’s stone house with that music piped in twenty-four hours a day.
“Seb, this music. Where’d you—I mean, you didn’t make this music, did you?”
“No. Creative Commons, it’s called. People make it and then give it away.”
“Aiello’s going to love this. He’s going to lose his shit.”
“I know.”
He did.
***
Blood tests, blood tests, blood tests. New rounds of treatment. Glimmers of hope, setbacks, setbacks.
At one point, Dr. Parvinder said to us, “I think it’s appropriate to be aggressive now.”
“What the hell were we doing before?”
But Connie put her hand on my arm, like, “Whoa, relax. It’s fine.”
It amazed me how much faith she’d put in everybody there, all the doctors and therapists and nurses involved in her care. Higher forces, just about, for someone like Connie who’d never believed in God.
Living with someone going through this sort of thing can make you feel like a real little shit. Connie was heroic in the face of her illness, in a way that made me feel shame. There’s no way I would’ve handled it like that. I knew it every day. Every time she shuffled into the room, laughing at a joke she’d just made, I felt dwarfed by her. Congrats, Kirk: you got the oil changed and made a dentist’s appointment and remembered to buy cereal. Meanwhile she’s managed to unearth the will to live yet another day in the face of horrendous pain and anguish.
The place near Merrickville sold. When Aiello called, he told me the buyer had specifically mentioned the video. “This relationship will be lucrative for the both of us,” he purred.
I danced in place and pumped my fist and screamed silently while Connie, looking irritated, said, “What? What is it? Kirk, what?”
After I’d hung up, I said, “Babe, your man here just won the Super Bowl.”
She smiled, then laughed a little, then started coughing and had to sit down.
That night, before I fell asleep, I asked myself if this was what success felt like. Then I asked myself if this is what happiness felt like. To both questions, I answered probably, at least a bit.
That new, totally unfamiliar feeling was related, I think, to my flying machines. Manoeuvrable, and outfitted with amazing little HD cameras, the UAVs gave me, for the first time, the ability to zoom in on things that were big and overwhelming. They said to me that, as long as I held steady, as long as I was true to my objective, I could analyze—and therefore come to grasp—big things as collections of little, understandable things.
And maybe get past them. The way Connie did.
Before, I would look at all the things ahead of us and be completely overwhelmed by them, by the sheer stupid mass of what lay ahead of us, of her, and I would shut down. But she had a way of zooming in on each thing, of breaking it down to a bunch of smaller things that, each, on their own, were maybe manageable, were maybe things we could handle. A bunch of little tasks and waypoints and easy objectives. Just this appointment. Just this treatment. I’ll be done throwing up in a few minutes. It was a necessary way of looking at the world and saying, We can do this.
That’s what the UAVs let me do, what drew me to them.
That and, you know, the money I was making.
After Aiello’s call, we ate dinner. Then Connie sat in her big chair, put her feet up, and started taking all her evening meds, one by one. Blue ones, yellow ones, white ones, chasing each with a sip of water.
“What do you want to fall asleep watching tonight?” she asked.
The joke being that, though she was the terminal cancer patient, I was the one who always complained about being tired, the one who’d nod off in the middle of Breaking Bad. When Connie got tired, she’d just say, I’m done, then leave the room and go to bed—whereas I’d say, I’m fine, wide awake! before yawning really loud and then snoring like a bandsaw.
I said, “Whatever you want to watch is good.”
Connie looked down at the remote, as if she wanted a firm plan in place before flipping on Netflix, to avoid that fifteen minutes of browsing that never leads to anything good.
And then she said, “I might need you to help me die.”
“What?”
“You know,” she said. “Come on. You know.”
I looked down at my hands and said, “Okay, babe.”
“If nothing else is working,” she said, “you know.”
“Yeah,” I said, “I know.”
My scalp went tight and my ears starting making a sound like strong wind.
“Don’t worry. We can make it easy. Just a job that needs doing. A few things to tick off a list. You can handle it, babe. I have some ideas. Anyway, let’s talk about it later. I can see it’s freaking you out.” She flicked on the TV. “You want to finish that Lord of the Rings one?”
“Sure,” I said, forcing something sour and hot back down my esophagus and into my stomach, where it had started. “Perfect.”
She’d opened the window next to her big chair a crack. A cold breeze slipped in, harbinger of fall. She lit up a joint. The movie started right where we’d shut it off the week before. There were pissed off orcs and translucent elves and the surround-sound clamour of swords clinking. Something screamed behind my head, then died. I was asleep in about twenty minutes.
***
The road south, after you crossed Beach Road—which was named not because there was anything resembling a beach anywhere nearby, but for the Beach family, Loyalists who’d had the first farm there—was called Rock Road, a rutted gravel lane with a mixed bag of tumbledown prefabs, trailers, and newer, swankier places. One of the latter was a three-storey timber-and-glass monstrosity that sat on top of a modest drumlin overlooking a pretty little meadow, a stone’s throw north of Oxford Station, past where some hockey executive had a horse farm. It was on the market for two-and-a-half, said Aiello, meaning million, and it was our next project.
Seb and I headed there one early-December Saturday morning. The sky was cold and without end, and there was a light dusting of new snow. It was going to
be a good day to shoot.
Seb, riding shotgun, was driving me crazy trying to play with the radio. At that particular moment, I was trying to listen to a show on NPR, floating up our way from Ogdensburg, New York, that played old country and hillbilly records on Saturday mornings. It was appointment listening for me.
“Fuck this inbred country shit,” Seb said, as Jimmy Rodgers yodelled his way through “T for Texas.”
“My truck, my inbred country shit,” I said, slapping his hand.
“I’d like some more control,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, “next time we’ll take your little Mazda 3, and we’ll listen to all the DJ Dickie Duck you want, or whatever.”
“I mean with the jobs. I was thinking that if I knew how to fly the units, we could do twice the jobs. You could expand the enterprise.”
“Expand.”
“Make more money.”
Beautiful, stupid, brilliant Seb.
“I can teach you today.”
The sun sparkled off the snow, and the sky was an eerie kind of blue. The timber-and-glass eyesore was dusted prettily, as were the majestic pines that surrounded it atop its little hillock. The whole thing looked like a diorama. Our breath streamed out of us in little white puffs. The air felt like a solvent, cleaning us out from our nostrils all the way down to our lungs, purifying our blood and making our brains’ thoughts crisper, with hard edges that fit neatly together. I’m overselling it probably, but know this: it was a beautiful day.
Aiello trusted me enough now that he no longer showed up to shoots. That, plus the fact that the owners weren’t home, made me feel at liberty to fuck around a bit and let Seb get his piloting feet wet.
I gave him a ten-minute tutorial, then turned the controls over to him.
Seb hovered the little copter at about head height for a moment, just looking at it, and then he had it shoot straight up into that endless sky.
“This,” he giggled, “oh, this. This is awesome.”
Lands and Forests Page 7
