The shaft was absolutely knitted with cobwebs, but the feet of my aluminium ladder hit a floor which sounded solid and dry. That may have just been the concrete I’d been dropping, but how else to find out? Work light on my head, a spare in my pocket, I hoisted a leg over and climbed down. The density of cobwebs emphasized the three-dimensionality of the air in the wood-framed shaft. The wet newspaper smell of earth, the drop in temperature, the rise in humidity, and the velvet coating of dust on Bill’s wooden framing all said hidden space. Despite the metal ladder I’d inserted and the chunks of cement wall I’d sent down the shaft, the cobwebs were still as snug as stirrups beneath my feet. My elbows were brushed constantly. My cheeks got tickled on every rung of the ladder. For love or money.
At the base of the access shaft, beneath the bits of wall, the floorboards were spongy but not rotten. Reputedly, the air was okay. Still, a quick peek into the tunnel itself—a concrete floor with a railway(!), a frame of concrete slabs, the auxiliary air pipe now running horizontally—and I knew I wanted it to breathe a little longer before we got to know each other. I crawled in just two metres to say hello. The old fucker laid rails. Case after case of booze hauled from one side to the other, his own private international railway. And those carved names. HICKLING • MORGAN • LOCK. I hauled myself back up the ladder to see them again. WELSBY • CARRINGTON • BROWN. Like ants crawling around and around with their loads and their communal will. PRYOR • LEATHER • MOORE. Bill’s engraving filled the outside face of each timber, while the underside of the header was still just brown wood. At least until I raced out, pious but practical, and bought an electric engraving tool. Dark international air swirled in the shaft below me as I reached up to carve William Williams, 1896—1925 on the underside of the same section of beam that had ONTARIO FARM II on its face.
Climbing up and climbing down, I’d see this inscription on each of my subsequent workdays. That done, it was time to go see Kate. Eventually, you gotta blow your mine.
43. The Land of Surprises
I was down to my last two relationship assumptions and about to break one of them. Now that I owned my job site, she had more reason than ever to not know the details. Normally, telling her what I really did might have finalized her exit visa for Splitsville. But Bill’s engraved names had crawled inside me. I wanted to be understood, not simply endured.
She was still in class when I got to our/the apartment, so I had time for a long shower. After days of digging, just stepping into civilian clothing was foreplay. Cooking was proto-sex. Shredded garlic unzipped into hot olive oil. The thigh-hugging warmth of the oven felt so generously civilized. Compact and effortlessly powerful speakers sliced and diced a little Berlin leisure-techno. A tempting life, but it all had to be paid for. I heard Kate’s key in the door and reached for a second wine glass. Whoops.
Voodoo was faster to greet her than I was. He nearly drilled himself into the floor turning circles as she stepped in and dropped her bags. I’d moved to the kitchen doorway so she could see me too, but Vood was beseechingly cute. She reached down to milk his ears and cup his chin. When he was finally on his back in full, tongue-lolling bliss she looked up from rubbing his belly. “Well, look what the dog dragged in. You look nice.”
“And you look great. Which do I have to be to get my belly rubbed, hairier or smaller?”
I got a little jolt not knowing whether we’d kiss. You sign a lease together and—blessing and curse—the kissing’s essentially a case of when not if. Kate’s silent dating scheme hadn’t been enough to truly give us a new first date, but a relationship-threatening pregnancy was something else altogether. What the hell, I leaned forward and tried the tongueometer. Not boiling, but certainly above the freezing point.
My hands trailed down for hers. “I’d like to finish cooking supper then show you something. Okay?”
“Ever the land of surprises.”
Warm food, a nice place, no dust in the air—I wanted to luxuriate in all of it and more. After several days of shoulder-tightening, uncertain labour, I would’ve liked to guzzle a bottle of wine. Not the time, though. Not the time.
Meals only last so long. I reached for her hand and met her gaze. “Obviously the pregnancy has changed everything.”
“Yes and no. My wanting to love you hasn’t changed.”
“If you’re willing, I’d like to show you something in the house. It’s not illegal per se.”
“Oh do say,” she replied, but with a little smile.
“Seriously, what I show you—there’ll be little separation between my work and…me.”
“You’re right, this I’d like to see.”
Voodoo perked up at the jingle of my truck keys.
Once again we drove towards the Ambassador Bridge (that other glowing border). There I finally was, baby half on board, sinning by vanity and creating a witness. I broke my vow to never do this precisely because we’d been skirting vows for weeks.
At the house, I led her in at the back. In the kitchen, I simply nodded to point her towards the doubled basement doors. Bill’s engraved doorway had made my new one useless. And indicting.
“Everything’s different now save how much I admire you, so I want to show you something else I admire. Like love, respect is a kind of gravity. You’ve got mine, and so do Gran and ol’ Bill.”
She pulled Gran’s basement door open then shot me a disappointment-rising look at the sight of the new, second door hanging open in the basement’s dim light. Two days ago I’d built that door to keep her out. Now I urged her through it. She wasn’t the only one confused by pregnancy.
A two-foot-by-five-foot cement adit in a basement wall opposite America is its own billboard. I didn’t have to nudge Kate towards the opened wall. I watched her stop and read the engraved names, her curious chin upturned as at the Rivera murals. I hoped those names were marching into her as they had into me. Worse than simply trying to impress her, I expected her to be impressed. Ah, love—tests and traps. If she didn’t get those names marching down the beams, the dead chiselled by the surviving, an illegal invasion after a legal one, she didn’t really get me. Bill’s gratitude was inseparable from his gamble. Mine too, baby. When the stakes truly matter, if you don’t love what I love, then we’re just working, a temporary bouquet not an annual garden. Sure, the word compromise may be indissoluble from relationship, but at times that has to bore, indict, and sadden you.
Finally, I stepped towards her to shine a flashlight on the pipe. “That’s for auxiliary air, so I’m still no wiser about what got him. It may not even be intact anymore, but if it is, look out, America.”
“Stop.” She held out her hand for the light. With its cool LED beam, she returned our attention to the wooden honour roll. “Look harder for the lesson here, Antony. Look much, much harder.” She swept the light across the names.
I already knew many of them by memory. HALL • BICKLEY • WARNOCK. Did she mean the connection to her Scottish heritage? MACKILLIGIN, TULLOCH, and MULQUEEN? The colonialism? Gender segregation? Apparently realization did not spring into my face quickly enough.
She reached out and set my fingertips into the brittle engraving of a name. “What’s the most obvious, most relevant fact about each of these names?” she asked. “Each of these men?”
My fingertips climbed up and down the crispy lettering as my time ran out. The WASPiness? The Eurocentrism? The absence of Belgians fighting in Belgium?
“They’re dead, you fucking idiot. They died underground, underage, and under-sexed. You think this will impress me? That it excuses you?!”
She turned and stormed up the stairs. Halfway up she stopped to look back down at me and the edge of that black hole. “Dead men aren’t the only heroes going.” She raised a foot but then lowered it. “Dead people,” she added, briefly placing a hand below her navel.
When the sound of my truck reversing down the drive faded I turned
back to the tunnel opening and tried to ignore Voodoo’s dance routine of confusion.
Again I saw those marching names, reached in to grip that cool throat of a pipe.
44. Theseus of Canadian Tire
Plan A didn’t work, so I poured everything into Plan B. B for beneath America.
History, art, and a little imagination can always help you think of someone lonelier than you. An illiterate Rwandan girl fleeing the genocidal slaughter of her family while she walks through lion- and rapist-infested bush eating the occasional grub was definitely lonelier than I was after Kate stomped off (again). Even here in privileged ConsumerLand, my loneliness was nothing compared to that of a pregnant Thai immigrant smuggled into a new country by criminals she’ll pay for ten years. My rational brain could conjure the lonely, but to my heart-brain there was no loneliness like male, self-exiled loneliness. You’re nothing without your code but nothing again if no one gets your code.
I tried to convince myself that this way I was taking all the pain up front. I’d swallow down that glassy hurt to spare us all my slow death as a suburban dad grinding out his resentment with a basement beer fridge, a dissatisfying career, and yardwork. Men and yardwork. Give me a break. Plumage work, what others see from the outside. Protecting the territory, pissing on its corners. That this comes with a burning engine or whirring blades couldn’t make Mr. Minivan happier as he spews around exhaust/ejaculate, driving away the children he claims to be serving. No thanks.
Take the loss head-on. Be hated. I let myself be left so we’d each have a gunshot breakup: the heat of the bullet cauterized its own wound. Guilty as charged. I couldn’t stand becoming the unsexed errand boy for a mewling little usurper empowered entirely by its lack of power. Chequebook fatherhood it would be. A monthly signed confession of failure rather than a protracted, child-damaging four- or seven- or ten-year failure of weekend boozing, McEngineering, and shopping. Fourteen-year-olds know the one in two odds of a marriage not working out, but only the divorce lawyers keep an eye on gender. In life after forty, two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women. Half his pension but none of his dirty socks. Good riddance blaring hockey. Western women now survive childbirth, but their marriages don’t survive childrearing.
Appropriate thoughts to take underground and underwater. Tunnelling is fundamentally about volume. More than length, more than depth, the volume matters. The amount of material you need to extract and, always unforgettable, the amount of it hanging above you. We’re probably taught geometry precisely so we can see math, see exclusion and intersection, borders, containment, how every inside has an outside. Geometry—the porn of math. If Bill had wanted to create a tunnel tall enough for someone to walk in, he would have had to quadruple his work, risk, time, and money compared to tunnelling a shallow little railway. In our basement, Windsor got its second light industrial railway with carts designed to carry crates of hooch and/or a prone man.
For all its years of neglect, the tunnel still looked navigable, at least at the start. Slats of prefab cement kept out most of the mud. Timbered U-frames played Atlas every four feet and held the world aloft. Even more resilient than this wood was the steel of the light rails. The morning after Kate squealed off in my truck I took a cab to Canadian Tire to buy one of those padded mechanic’s creepers (aka a Windsor Hide-A-Bed), then expanded its wheel base. Finally I too was another Windsor DIYer rolling close to the dirty ground and trailing my tools. I went out with a spool of cheap nylon cord to mark distance, several water bottles, a compact shovel, an air horn, a knife, a hammer for rats, a bag full of LED lights and CO monitors I could drop along my way. I carried a cellphone, lube for the rails, and a new tarp I hoped not to use.
Curious is too small a word. So is excited. You can read about explorers or revolutionaries or smugglers all you want, but little of it will adequately give you the heart-swatting, pelvis-tingling exhaustion/energy of steady fear wed to steady hope. Rolling feet first into the damp cobwebs, inching along, I was my own needle on a horizontal gauge of terror and thrill. Agreed: beauty is terror.
I wrote all this in chunks in case you wanted to dive in anywhere. That table of contents could let you keep things whole in whatever order you’d like. Not so with the tunnel. Tunnels are undeniably, mercilessly linear. I played out my nylon cord as I rolled, though I felt more like Champlain going up the St. Lawrence for the first time than Theseus braving the labyrinth. As the Theseus myth gets retold, his duplicity is almost always omitted. Now the Theseus myth is about a clever youth outwitting an older, more powerful male monster for romantic and financial gain, another purebred noble grinding down the filthy mixie. But the spool of yarn was female Ariadne’s idea, not Theseus’s. As soon as they’d sprung themselves from her father’s maze and were safely on the high seas he dumped her on a remote island. Once abandoned, Ariadne was “wed to Dionysus” (translation: she hit the bong for the rest of her life). Wham bam, good-bye, ma’am. The Greek myths and the barnyard will show you fathers who slay, rape, lie, and abandon. I wasn’t abandoning Kate. She was abandoning us. Underground and underwater, inching towards my fate, I was as certain of this and what I did and didn’t want to find.
Theoretically I’d be most likely to find the Detroit River’s second shoreline down there, a section of washed-out tunnel holding Bill’s corpse unseen in Davey Jones-Crockett’s Locker. But if the tunnel wasn’t flooded, I might have a murdered corpse on my hands. Or two. As I rolled on, playing out my cord, never more alone, I began to wonder again about a third family theory for Bill’s end. Crushed by a cave-in, double-crossed and murdered, or…Gran would never have abided any suggestion that he might have one day taken his private railway to America and then hopped another train, but Gloria and I were free to wonder. On the surface, sure, Bill’s absconding was highly illogical. First and foremost, why would he have quit a smuggling operation that had been very difficult to establish then brought in crates of cash every day? He disappeared with several lucrative years of Prohibition still ahead of him. If he’d kept up his game, he’d have been empire rich, not just dynasty rich. Ask the Kennedys. Or the Gurskys. And the details: he’d have been without a car or luggage and had to have abandoned a woman and son he loved. But I’m just assuming he loved them. After several years of Prohibition rail, had the tunnel bored him? Or, even more terrifying, had lawlessness been too appealing? Once he’d stepped beyond one set of rules, maybe he’d chucked the whole lot, left Peg and VC a house and plenty of cash then signed a more exclusive contract in the biggest smuggling game the world had ever known. That and/or the road called his name. The punctuated self. The floating island. Better the devil you can make yourself than the one someone else will make of you. Perhaps I was rolling out in another gene conduit, not simply a tunnel. Maybe both sides of my family, not just one, didn’t like to stick around for the colicky nights. For some, filing cabinets look more like coffins than tunnels.
I’d always been told that Peg and Bill loved each other, but those stories were one-sided and from those bygone days of lifetime marriage. The nuclear family is as obsolete as the town crier, the stage coach, and the telegraph. How much of love in the past was willed, was made, not found? Gloria, Ms. Anti-Marriage, had waited until I was old enough and then started indulging in speculations about a wandering Bill trying a third country on for size. In this she may have been reaching back a few generations to pre-emptively excuse her own interest in a bounder (or two or three). I’d never found the theory of Bolting Bill very compelling until I was rolling out under the river, thinking of how secret and private so much of his life was. Take a man out of the world, out of sex, and even out of his tribe, how’s he ever go back in?
Rolling out underground and under two countries, I theorized about Bill to ignore the fact that I might meet a corpse or two in that damp dark. He was a veteran of not just tunnelling, but tunnelling in war. Tunnellers carried knives, grenades, and illegal pistols strapped across their bodies in case the
y met Jerry. A few years ago I went over to Belgium and got down into some of those old tunnels. The brown, timbered braces still have duelling scars from stray pistol shots.
Did Bill’s possible killer also have experience fighting in cramped spaces? My valorizing assumption had been that Bill would have been the attacked, not the attacker. But the man I was following set his own rules. Did smuggler=killer? Even if he had been attacked, if he’d struck back I might have had two corpses on my hands, neither of them distinguishable as (possible) family.
The walls and air dampened as I continued to descend. The cement sidewalls turned from grey to charcoal as they became waterlogged. In places, water began dribbling through the seams. The walls, at least, cried for what I was losing.
Every metre I rolled out I told myself I’d be able to pull Bill’s skeleton from the tunnel if I had to. If there had been a skeleton or two, I would have had to ferry them back out trussed across my own body on the creeper, a stack of lonely, career-dedicated men, their skeletons piled above mine on a thin tarp. Then I would also have had to dispose of two skeletons I didn’t kill. Snap the lads down into hockey bags, rent a boat with cash, wait ’til nightfall, and, like Medea, scatter my brothers piece by sinking piece. So I thought until the air got wetter.
Still water and dark mud killed my great-grandfather and a few more of my delusions. All that dipping geometry was never more flagrant than in the eventual merger of the descending rails and a deepening pool of still, dark water. As far as I could tell with my lights, the water eventually filled the tunnel entirely. It could have been a leak from above or even an underground spring from below. Frankly, it didn’t matter. I’d been a fool, had been playing out fantasies, not just nylon cord. Repairing a flooded tunnel would have been impossible as undetected, solo work. Fast pumps, six hundred metres of wide hose, patching gels, SCUBA suits. Not on my life.
Keeping Things Whole Page 23
