by Colin McAdam
No sirens in those days, just a hope that everyone’s been told.
“Tony! Get behind the fuckin truck!”
ARE YOU STILL jumping on your heels? Keep it up and I’ll tell you how to make a baby.
I made a baby. Right then. Right when we were laying those charges.
Funny coincidence. Laying charges. Babies. You think I’m making it up.
Threading, blasting caps, Boom! Ha!
Cheers.
See, Kathleen and I, I don’t mind saying, had some good strong sex in those days. And most of the time, after she came like a fist, say, I would shout my pearls on her belly or whatnot. But sometimes not.
“BEHIND THE TRUCK, you fuckin idiot!”
And Johnny hooked it up all wrong, so back you go and try again. This wire here, that wire there.
Farther back! Farther back!
Then when it all works right there’s thunder from the earth and the world seems upside down.
Stop jumping if you want.
My point is that when you’re near those explosions you feel it Whack! at your feet first. It’s unexpected every time. The smoke, flying dirt, noise—you expect those things. But the Whack! at your feet, the first smack of a long whip that Smacks! again at your neck.
I like it.
JERRY WAS NOT a mistake. Jerry was not my mistake. Jerry was not a beautiful mistake. Jerry was mine and was beautiful.
Seven pounds, small as a finger.
KATHLEEN DISAPPEARED for more than a month when the first set of frames went up. I was pretty sure I saw her truck just up ahead, rounding that corner over on Glyde or crawling up the McCarthy Hill. But I never saw her at breakfast, never saw her at lunch, or when I wanted her like a cure.
“Hey, Jerry. Seen your lady the other night driving like a fuckin wild horse. How come she’s not fixing us lunch these days?”
“Where’d you see her?”
“I don’t know. Thirty-six beer in me.”
She didn’t drive away forever. I think. She’s just there—you can smell the exhaust—don’t blink or she’ll speed up.
I thought I saw her one night and I ran a bit, broke a toenail on the steel in my boot. I ran after everything yellow.
It is best to run after everything, especially if you know that it’s probably not what you really want—just a big yellow bag blowing in the night, something ridiculous from who-knowswhere, twirling around a corner to who-cares. No meaning, just a flat disappointment that leads to more running. Better than knowing you should stop.
“THE TROUBLE with you, Jerry McGuinty, is that you exaggerate. And yer blind. I was not gone for a month, I just spent a few days or a week tryin out some new things, sites and that. I like the warm welcome, the flippin hero’s welcome I get—don’t get me wrong, it’s lovely—but bloody Mary, Jerry, a woman can go for a little while collecting herself and it doesn’t have to be a year or whatever ya say it is.”
“A month.”
“A month. Don’t talk to me about months. I can tell you with a great deal of truth, Jer, that you have no idea what a month means, what . . . one flippin month can give and take away.”
“What?”
“Never mind. You think I was gone for a month, but it’s the month that’s gone from me. I’ll tell you honestly, Jerry, I don’t feel like getting naked with you just now. What I feel like is a flippin shout of a night, a bit of a bonfire or a bottle or two. That is honestly what I want.”
“All right.”
“But we don’t need to leave the truck. I don’t mean going out or anything, seeing that filthy crew of yours in the bar.”
“What?”
“If ya reach just under that seat there you’ll find a bottle of Dewar’s, there, yeah? Is it there?”
“No.”
“Well, there’s one up . . . yeah . . . there we are. Now, do us the kindness, Jer, if ya don’t mind, and we’ll just get happy feckin drunk, if that’s all right witchyez. A month. A month my arse, I couldn’t leave yiz for a month. Now, just stay where you are, for I am a bit fragile at the moment. There now. Cheers. To time flying. To flippin time flying.”
Kathleen didn’t cry very often. Bonfire nights and special occasions. Usually when she cried it was a tactic during arguments. But not tonight, my friend. Tonight she wept from her stomach.
I stood up to comfort her and I rammed my shoulder into that shelf where she cuts tomatoes. Here’s the scar. When I got near her she was crying in such a powerful private way that I never felt farther from her.
We got drunk that night, boy. I got drunk because it went well with my confusion. I didn’t have a clue why she got so drunk.
I was bleeding from my shoulder and we talked about houses, basements, chicken, whether or not she should keep her butter in the fridge, and how there was no feckin way you’d find her accountable for anything, of any sort, just this minute, because she’s mad, drunk, mad, and it’s all a feckin mess.
That truck felt small, so out we go for a drunk of fresh air, and the whiskey’s alive in the throat, breathes thoughts out lost.
“Why are you so drunk, Kathleen?”
“We’re both drunk, and I’m not.”
“Neither am I.”
“Where did you go, Kathleen?”
“I’m here in the truck.”
“Are you?”
“You’re so small.”
“Don’t talk in that high voice. Ya sound like a man who’s a lady.”
“I’m drunk, Kathleen.”
“It’s good for ya.”
Back inside the truck with half a wrestle, half a fuck in the doorway, and a drunken smile from my beautiful, who’ll fix me a roast-beef sandwich always fresh. I tell Kathleen everything, cause I’m a small man in my heart right now and she needs to know that now because that’s what I am, frightened, kind of scared of her.
“I’ll tell ya what it is to be a strong man, Jer, and that’s stay the feck away from me tonight, but don’t leave, for here’s yer sandwich. Kiss my teeth there, Jerry, that’s nice. I just don’t have the energy . . . for more.”
We talked shit, and I woke up trying to forget a lot of it because somehow it ended up with her punching me in the ear. Certainly yes, I asked her to marry me, and she said I hadn’t a feckin clue. She kept hinting at things that I truly had no clue about, mostly to do with little Jerry floating inside her like a poisoned needle.
I asked her to marry me maybe four or five times while she was telling stories of mystery and nothing, and I can’t remember exactly what happened, but I woke up on the floor of a half-framed house with blood on my shoulder, a ringing in one ear, and Tony Antonioni saying,
“Jerry, Jerry, to wash out blood, my mother she use water with gas. Fizzy!”
And I am sorry to report that Kathleen was then gone for two months.
THE FIRST TIME I met Jerry, he was a bulging explanation in front of Kathleen. She had just washed a pot, and had decided to get naked—turned toward me and slung a dishcloth over her arm and there he was in the middle of her, shyly winking through her belly-button eye. She was pushing out her stomach instead of talking.
Sure, I felt shock, joy, worry, but most of all I was happy to see Kathleen returned and naked.
He was Jerry right away because I had forgotten that babies could be girls. He was maybe the size of an orange, I guess, and Kathleen echoed his mystery standing there all calm and quiet and totally unknowable. She stayed quiet and let me get naked and away I went, easing into the thought that Jerry wasn’t an orange and could be a girl, knocking and shivering against the fear that I was in a stranger and a stranger was in her.
It was a cold, hot, necessary place where Kathleen, Jerry and Jerry came together.
TONY DID A FINE JOB on the frames. Beautiful. And the bricks were coming up thanks to me and Espolito. Five houses done by the time Jerry was born.
Beat that.
6
SMALL PROJECTS SUPPOSEDLY kept him busy. Despite the fact that his job w
as newly created, he inherited a number of tasks from differently titled predecessors. Parkways were to be laid here and there. There was talk of creating museums. Nothing to awaken the best of Simon. The first time he made love to Renée on his desk inspired him to stay behind until midnight, transforming those parkways into minor Appian Ways. But nothing entertained him as much as the idea of how he probably seemed to Renée. (He barely spoke, maintained a witty spark in his eyes, dressed impeccably. She was enthralled.)
He was told of a book that everyone in the Division either mocked or adored, the creation of a man who had Mandarin status but died in obscurity. It was a simple list, ten pages long (then), bound in leather, of all the projects dreamed up by the Division that never became reality. Those who adored it also added to it, updated it every year, rebinding it if necessary. Everyone called it the Dreambook (those who mocked it called it the Dreambook, with the same vocal italics given to girls by boys in the playground). Simon adored it as soon as he heard about it, but he heard about it only after being in his job for over a year.
Looking into it might have stopped the incipient blur of his career. Once he heard about it, he was afraid to look into it, afraid to attract derision, afraid to open it like those who avoid reading scripture for fear that it will spoil the mystery. It was also hard to find, being passed from desk to desk to be augmented, consulted for a laugh. Eventually he opened it, looked deeply into it, and the best of Simon was awakened.
But in the meantime there were the parkways. There were estates of great men to be “designated” sites of national historical significance. Nothing to give Simon dimension or a sense of what he could do.
It was sad how quickly it all began to blur for him. All his promise steadily trampled under the march of Monday to Friday. It was a civil servant who first gave names to days, realizing that every week each different day would behave as it had before.
THE DREAMBOOK was in Eleanor’s office once when Simon was waiting for her. He quickly glanced at a random page.
He saw that a community center was once proposed: not the degenerate sort that now proliferate, but an elegant one, fantastically expensive, where children could be left in comfortable, imaginatively padded rooms with an impossible array of activities and minders; where adults could associate as comfortably and nobly as Romans in their baths. It could have dominated a city block left empty by demolition.
Silly, Simon thought.
But not really.
He closed the book when Eleanor came in.
“IMAGINE WHAT the public needs. Imagine what the public needs,” said the ghost of Simon’s father, over, and over, and over.
7
AGE OF TWO, Jerry my Jerry McGuinty the Second was the proud soft spokesman for the idea of silence and skin. Round little shoulders, nipples dappled pink by a painter’s little finger. All the right parts for a boy, yes sir.
Who’s a strong little soldier, eh? Hop up here on my knee now.
He was always cute chewing a banana—like it needed more chewing than it did. It occupied his mouth for half a day, which was often why he was so quiet.
And he was no taller than that chair leg there, in that first house there, whose smell of paint still hid in some of the closets. (I built it as quick as Kathleen could swell.)
Age of two, Jerry could stumble around the first little neighborhood created by his father, and I have no doubt he was proud. Sod freshly laid all around by Mario and Johnny, badly done in some spots to trip up little Jerry. Up you get there, big guy.
Age of two, our Jerry had three neighbors. It was a good start. I don’t recommend living in the same neighborhood as the people whose houses you’ve built, since you become the resident repair man responsible for every woe.
But I had a House. I lived in my own House. Yes. Knock on those walls, buddy, and hear your knuckles say Here. And my Jerry could give his curiosity a tall square shape.
What’s that roof?
It’s Daddy’s.
Da-doe.
Eee!
Da-dee!
“Give him another banana, Jer.”
I WAS THE AWFUL sort of neighbor who wanted more neighbors. Come on, gather round, tell your friends it’s a great place to live!
I had no clue what it was like to live there, of course. I knew it in the dark coming quiet through the door. I knew it for that sweet smell of babies and a few little snorts, but it was all a blink in the dark.
“Yer a great feckin help, Jer, a right feckin champion. In at midnight, out at dawn. Would ya like a break from parentin, arse . . . ya feckin asshole?”
I was home when Jerry woke in the night sometimes. You know, awake for a cry and it’s all right because Daddy’s here. I don’t feel guilty about that. I gave Kathleen a break.
“Fecker.”
He was quiet as a stone compared to other babies, so I hear. I didn’t have to cuddle him often, as far as I know.
“Do you know, Jer, I’ve been with other men before. I don’t tell yiz about that much, but they say we should talk about that sort of thing more, you know, a man and a woman. And they’ve been men, Jerry, real men. I’m not going to say anything more, and all, but let’s just leave it at that, or let’s just say that some of them, if they’d be coming home at one in the morning, wouldn’t necessarily be complaining about all the work they were doing, or wouldn’t be lapping up to me, licking like a feckin little dog. You know, take it easy, Jerry, and let me get some flippin sleep. I’ve been with the other Jerry all day.”
It was a three-bedroom house, so I got to try out some of the other rooms. Not a bad size. Can’t hear a thing through the walls: good walls, quiet boy. Sleep was like being pushed backward in the dark—mornings were for steadying myself.
FOUR HOUSES SOLD!
Five houses sold!
The sixth was bought by a doctor!
I’M SURE YOU’VE had a bad carpet somewhere in your life. Maybe in your first house? Maybe in the closet where your parents forgot you?
I made a deal with a carpet maker in that first development, to cover all the floors in a one-inch blue plush. A young friendly color to hug my homeowners’ feet. When I showed some of the first buyers the houses I remember a lot of them did say,
“Nice carpet.”
But I myself learned to hate it. I never got any complaints about it. The guy who sold it to me made a fortune from it, selling a shorter-pile version to all the Government buildings. But I couldn’t stand it. All around the edges, you see, around the walls, the twists of fiber would come loose, wriggle loose, one by one by one, like cheerful maggots, like a million little itches, you see.
At first I didn’t pay much attention because it was freshly laid. You expect strands of carpet in a new house like you expect hair in your collar after a haircut. Fine. But not six months later, not three years later.
“Kathleen?”
“What?”
“Have you noticed that the carpet is still losing its fibers?
You know, around the edges?”
“What?”
“The carpet.”
There was Jerry looking up at us with a strand of blue carpet on his lips.
“No.”
I was sleeping in the spare room more often, and the carpet was especially bad in there. It shone at night like a ragged moon and I was always trying to tidy it. If it shone more cleanly I would be more comfortable. I don’t know why.
“The more I pick at it the more it sheds. But in fact, Kathleen, when I don’t pick at it, it still sheds.”
“Fascinating, Jer.”
Once when I kissed Jerry goodnight, I got some on my lips. I told him, “Jerry, you put carpet on my lips!”
“Ips!”
But it became serious. Kathleen made me sleep in the spare room for two weeks and I couldn’t stop picking at the rug, hunting maggots. I found them more easily in the dark, and I made piles to gather in the morning.
I couldn’t sleep in Jerry’s room even though I wanted to s
ometimes. It was always beautifully warm in there, but Kathleen warned me not to wake him.
“He’s been twirlin and screamin like a jumpin flippin banshee, Jer, and if you wake him I will slit yer throat.”
I slept in the closet sometimes, which is embarrassing, but I hadn’t meant to tell anyone. It was darker, and perfectly built. If you had four hours to sleep, bruised your body all day, and had to sleep near a squirming plush of blue, you would occasionally choose the closet. I could cover the carpet with a blanket in there.
Also, you see, I could hear it moving. I wasn’t scared of it, don’t be a fool, I was just angry with it for changing, for growing out of the house I built for it.
Replacing it was out of the question. Do you know how much a carpet cost? It was money, my debts, that got Kathleen so angry—that was why I was in the spare room.
“We wouldn’t have needed such a big house, such an expensive house, if you’d have kept yer bleedin wick out of me in the first place.”
So the understanding was that I was to keep it out of her for a while and to think as much as I could about money. I’ll just give you a quick idea of what depended on me selling the rest of my houses:
Tony Antonioni
Tony’s wife: Pia
Tony’s children: Tony, Joe, and Tony
Tony Espolito
Tony’s wife: Pia
Mario Calzone
Johnny Cooper
Johnny Cooper
Johnny Cooper
John (Jack) Mackay, owner of the backhoe
Colin (Co) Maloney, for staples, nails, and spackle
For Franklin Thomas Murphy, surveyor,
five percent of the first four houses.
For Roger Boast, bull-chest banker,
blind eyes turned and bottomless hanker for interest, “Jerry, no thank you, Jerry,
twenty percent is treating you fairly,”
twenty thousand dollars.
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