In a way, Christ is an elevator.
Dark weathered wood and traces of paint. His eyes looked closed but when I bent my knees the eyes were open. Theyre cast down. If they were closed he’d be suffering for my sins. But theyre open, so he is triumphant. Sneaky Christ!
Sometimes youre in a place because youve been kicked out of all the other places, I said to the Oven. Some days youre in the middle of the air without your shoes on.
And I realized I was sharing my Wyoming with a kid. I wasnt alone here, I was telling him everything.
We walked around the old city for the rest of the morning, and half the time I carried Owen. I put him on my shoulders with his legs around my ears. I caught us in a mirror and we looked like a pagan totem. The boy giving birth to the man. It made me feel vulnerable, but at least I had fifty-four dollars in my pocket. I bought another coffee and the Oven wanted fries but I said we had to wait until noon, you can’t go eating fries before noon. It felt like I’d been up for days, and then I realized I had been. I thought about David and Nell. I saw them talking together and putting a hand where a hand should not go. I created whole films of them that were probably close to the films that exist someplace in space and will, soon, with the correct technology, be spooled back in and used to lay guilt on us all. Judgment day will come, I thought, and I wondered if there was any snap in that. All my life is devoted to thinking if there’s snap to something, or if an event is empty.
I didnt see David that day. It was nice to have a break from him and it was good to hang out with a kid. Kids shake you up. I’d had it out with Dave and now this reprieve. But what kind of reprieve was it. This was David’s son. Really I was hanging out with the ideas and acts of David, rather than the man himself. Here were his repercussions. For I had none. But then perhaps we are blind to our own repercussions. We are too short to see them on top of a man’s balding head.
I went back to Sok Hoon’s driveway and had Owen stare into the windows. I was shy, I said. And had never looked at my own home the way I was making him look at his. There was his mother, doing something, she was bent over to a task. It could have been rolling pastry or it may have been keeping herself balanced. I remember my father, building a new kitchen. He took my mother by the arm and had her stand by the window where the kitchen counters would be. He made a pencil mark on the wall next to her wrist. So the counters would be hers.
Okay Owen go in to your mother.
I let Owen enter on his own to her. They didnt need me barging in. And I turned and saluted the school across the street where Owen was beginning his education. Then I ended up on the Main and ate fish in a diner. The toilets were amazingly dirty.
But at around nine I called Sok Hoon. I was worried about you, she said. She was just running an iron over some clothes and could use the company. I thought, the Prince one night and ironing the next. Perhaps everyone irons.
There’s a mattress for you in the guest room, she said. But when we looked David had returned, quietly sneaking in, and crashed on it. It was partly deflated. He was still in his clothes and his shoes were tightly on. He had probably seen Allegra.
Come on, Sok Hoon said. That’s your cue.
She was emanating the thought that we could be closer.
Look, I said. Let’s just have something small.
Right here by the bathroom.
And I kissed her. It was delicious, like eating apricots. It was a lip balm she was wearing. It made my shoulders relax. I pushed the skyline of her body against me. All I needed was to pull something towards me, something warm. And Sok Hoon, it was a conciliatory kiss. She was feeling sorry for me, that I was going through an anguish with Nell that she had already come out the other side of with Dave. It was a kiss that said it’ll be okay, youre a good person, I like you.
I WOKE with David’s arm around me, breathing his dead breath on my mouth. The mattress was flattened, he’d kicked off his shoes and one of them was under my chest.
Wake up, the Oven said. He was eating peanut butter and toast. The boy lived off things on bread.
Ahoy matey.
There is a shell of David, his eyes opening up, his lips a crease, barely alive.
Owen: Hi Dad. I saw you this morning with your boots still on.
David:You want to go see your aunt in New Hampshire?
Sok Hoon: I’m taking Owen across the street.
Dad you take care of yourself.
WE WATCHED SOK HOON and Owen cross the street and go to Sunday school, but as they crossed two police cruisers arrived and Sok Hoon was called over to one. A woman. They spoke and pointed at the school. There was a sign that said Early Intervention. I remember going to school and I know the type of boy the Oven is. He reminded me of Gerard Hurley. I knew Gerard Hurley when we were the age of Owen. We were the same age, with birthdays in March. When you share an astrological sign you can’t help but like the person.
I recalled his red star in Grade Two, that moment of change for Gerard Hurley. He was what, seven. He was that boy there, the age of Oven. And now the policewoman was assisting them back across the street and then returning to the cruiser while two men from the other car walked down the school steps doing paperwork.
What’s going on.
Sok Hoon:Theyre conducting an investigation.
Owen: I got the day off.
Me: Congratulations.
We went off to the kitchen and I heard Sok Hoon say, There’s been a report of abuse.
DAVID WANTED TO SPEND THE AFTERNOON in Sok Hoon’s bed, but I wouldnt let him. We have to pick up the car and dog, I said. It’s Sunday.
He got the keys for the Land Rover. We drove to Lars Pony’s and he hollered for the dog. She did this graceful leap in through the back window of the Land Rover. We were both proud of her. Dave drove away and Lars waved as if he always took care of out-of-town dogs.
That’s a good dog, Lars said to me, that Bucephalus.
Me:What did you say?
The dog’s name.
Me:What are you doing with that hose?
He was standing there with about eleven feet of green articulated hose and a roll of duct tape like a bracelet on his forearm.
Your car reminded me I got to check some things on my car, he said.
What kind of car.
A beauty, he said. The only thing I got in this life that’s been faithful.
And when he said that he became the man in the fox coat. These men, thinking cars are faithful. Did I love our car. I opened the driver’s door and started it up. Smooth. I put my hands on the wheel. Then I lifted them and looked at where my hands had been.
He was standing there delighted at himself. Lars had solved a puzzle.
You take care, he said. And waved. I saw him, as I went over the rise. He walked out into his street and kept waving. He waved like I was the last person on earth.
I ORDERED SOME PLAIN CROISSANTS and a bag of coffee and tested the car a bit before going back to Sok Hoon’s. Then I drove up behind the Land Rover and got out and I looked under the chassis. Dry as a bone.
David and Sok Hoon were sitting at the kitchen table, just staring at each other. They looked like they needed to be programmed.
Some of the kids, Sok Hoon said, have been taped to chairs.
What about Owen.
He saw it. He said it never happened to him.
They looked like they had exhausted the subject but didnt know how to change it. David had dodged a bullet. The bullet had been marching him across the street and strangling a teacher. They were looking for me to change things so they didnt have to imagine any more the strangling and the charges and David incarcerated.
Duct tape, I said. And suddenly I knew what Lars Pony had in mind.
I drove back across town with David Twombly. I pointed there and turn right and no it’s better this way. Finally we were lost because I was panicking and David looked up the universal number on his pebble and guided us there under the satellite for global positioning. We pulled up to
the little house and I hoped the house would not be soon for sale.
The front door was locked. Try the gate. The house was joined to the next house by a wooden gate. It was pointy on top and I could not get over it. David did. Heavy but dexterous. I called to him. I said, Do you hear a car running.
Then I pressed my head up to the gate and I could hear it chugging in the garage in back. I couldnt see David because of the tall gate, just the edge of the garage door. But I heard him. I heard a window break and then a swear word. Now the car running louder and shutting off. But the garage door wasnt opening. So now he’d gone in the house.
The front door opened. A man’s hand, bandaged. At first I thought it was Lars. I knew it was Lars. Then it’s David with a cup towel around his fist. He had his pebble. He was calling for help.
NINE
WE NEED NEW SHIRTS, David said. If we’re to go into the States we need new shirts. All the old adventurers wore good shirts.
Can’t you, for a few minutes, think about what’s just happened.
He was looking at the scale in kilometres. About the time. Refolding the Michelin map.
We take the 87 south and cross over to Sasha, he said.
Youre a cunt, you know that? All Lars wanted was a bit of company.
David took a moment to translate something in his head. Dont be responsible, he said, for any man’s choices. That will lead you to ruin.
He counted off the days and where we’d be on the map. We had to stick around for Lennox Pony to show up. But then we’d hit the road south. If anything happens, he said, I take the next flight. If they dont let me on board I’ll get Massimo to make me false papers. That anything, he added, could be here with Owen, or with my father.
There were big airports in Newark and New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. He would keep his pebble on alert.
David poisoned me. But he had a point. Or, he had a way of pushing through life which made him not feel bogged down by the badness. He had badness and badness affected him, but it seemed, every morning, he’d wake up to a new start.
We waited a day for Lennox Pony. We hadnt seen him since he was fourteen years old. And there he was, a big man. He didnt look anything like Lars. Except in his shoulders. His shoulders had the same hesitation, the deking move Lars had on the basketball court. In fact, shoulders can manipulate a lot of things. He had been an excellent goalie. He’d left Corner Brook and moved to Alberta and worked in the tar sands until a depression got him down. It was an illness and he was medicated so only his shoulders were alive. His eyes were dead. He’d lost his marriage. Something of the father had concentrated in the son, so it was an even stronger force, but also there was a more fierce tendency to live in Lennox. He wasnt going to kill himself. Everything in him was more powerful than the father, in both the positive and negative spectrum. He was like the nuclear era versus the dynamite era. Less total war.
I’m sorry for your loss, David said to him. And he meant it. I saw his eye and Lennox took him to be a sincere, thoughtful man. Which he was. But what residual feeling did Lennox have about being the young one, the black one, the second-last to be chosen, the one we all mauled a little, even me.
Lennox got off his chair and sat on the grass and lay back in the sun. He was flat in the grass, almost hidden. So I got up and did the same thing. It’s good to let the sky take up most of your vision. It cleaves you from the world and you can think of it as a separate thing from you, like youve got your back up against the wall of the earth and now youre going to walk away from it. I peered up to see what David was doing and he too had come down to the ground. Three men flaked out in the grass, about to stroll away from the world. The grass is a big thing. Usually men are with smaller things, that’s why we like women. Most men are uncomfortable with things larger than themselves, so it took some trust for us all to give in to the earth. Then Lennox spoke.
When I was a kid, he said, my dad bought an old diesel motor. It was the size of a Volkswagen. We built a shed for it out in the Lemon Yard. It had an exhaust pipe out the side. The motor was not used for anything, Lennox said. His father loved it for the sake of it working.
The ground in his back made his voice solid, like wood.
That was my first mechanical appreciation, he said. We’d go into the Lemon Yard, adjust the choke, turn the crank and have it sputter to life. It made power but it wasnt power harnessed to any use, just the marvel of power being made.
I tried to remember that motor, its little shed. I remember the Lemon Yard. There’s a drug store built on there now. We used to play ball in the Lemon Yard.
Dave: Remember that movie we were in?
Lennox:We were never in a movie. We never made it into the movie.
Dave:We were in the movie.
What were they talking about. I searched out the sky above for some sense of it. And then, of course, I remembered. We were really young. People from Hollywood had come to make a movie. They used a house on Valley Road and they were shooting exteriors all around the town. It was a film about two friends who work at the pulp mill. One day we were playing baseball in the Lemon Yard. And Lars Pony came out to us and said he heard on the radio they were looking for extras. They want a whole bunch of extras down at the mill.
The actor starring in it, Gordon Pinsent, was a Newfoundlander, but he’d been in American films. In one movie he played the president of the United States—he was a sort of JFK dealing with the cold war. Then in The Thomas Crown Affair he introduces Steve McQueen to Faye Dunaway.
We left our gloves and picked up our hockey sticks and took an orange hockey ball down Valley Road to see what was going on at the mill. They couldnt get enough kids for this scene. They said the hockey sticks were good, pretend youre playing street hockey. And you, what’s your name.
They were pointing at Zac Twombly.
You want a role in this movie?
Zac got a speaking part. He had to ask Gordon Pinsent if he’d seen his father in there. His line was, Hey Will. That was Gordon Pinsent’s character’s name. And we had to play behind the scenes, play some excellent street hockey, like we were also waiting for our fathers. It was pretty exciting. We’d never seen cameras and booms and the little caravan where you could get sandwiches and coca-cola. I must have drunk six cokes that afternoon. Then it was time for Zac’s scene. We were proud of Zac. We’d heard him practising his line over and over. Hey Will, he said. Hey Will. And then Gordon Pinsent was cued to walk through the mill gates and Zac had to break away from us and go up to him. Hey Gordon, he said.
At that time, being six, we thought there’d be a film shot in Corner Brook every summer. We didnt know that would be the last one ever. It sort of spoiled us, expecting the big wide world to come to us as soon as school was over.
A year later the movie came out. We all went down to the Millbrook Mall to see it. There’s a great scene where Gordon Pinsent spends his wedding night in the Holiday Inn on West Street. We were all waiting for the scene after that, when Gordon Pinsent’s best friend is killed in a pulp vat, and Zac has to go up to Gordon Pinsent at the mill gates and say Hey Will. How they had to shoot that scene a couple of times because Zac was so nervous. But the next scene was the funeral and then Will getting bitter and losing his humour. The scene with the kids never got in there. Lennox was right, none of us are in it.
We said so long to Lennox and drove back to Sok Hoon and said our farewells to Owen. This wasnt planned, just something Lennox had done made David want to see Owen one last time. A grieving son and then a young son. I looked at David as we drove towards the border. Then he slowed down and pulled over.
My glasses.
We had to find an off-ramp and wheel around and drive back while Dave called on his pebble. This turning around and the phone call made Bucephalus nervous. It was as if she thought we might leave her, and so I stroked her down to get her to lie flat. We found the store and pulled over and quickly got out as if we were a pair of plainclothes policemen from a seventies drama. We wal
ked in together. David had stitches in his head and a white bandage around his hand. You look like if you dont get glasses soon, the lady said, youre going to do yourself in. It was nice to spend a few last moments in a Canadian store. They had the glasses there behind the glass counter in a silver case. They seemed thicker framed now and as Dave drove he kept pushing them up on his nose, touching the lenses and frames until there were fingerprints and smudges all over the edges of the glasses. It was a new method of punctuation as he talked and there was something in their hue that accentuated the stitches on his skull. Then I noticed the fresh pavement to the south and the new striping was like white stitches on a charcoal suit. We’d head south then yank her east and hit New Hampshire and meet Dave’s sister. Then it was Maine and carry on to Nova Scotia and push through to the ferry for Port aux Basques. That was the plan. When you have a plan you dont need to talk for an hour. Which Dave obeyed for about five minutes.
TEN
LET ME GET A WORD in edgewise, I said. I was driving now.
David: Have I been talking?
You havent stopped.
When does that word ever get used.
What word.
Edgewise.
It doesnt.
It doesnt get a chance to get edgewise into any other sentence.
It was the slippers, he continued. Then it was that she was wearing everything the same. I mean, she wore the same things. A pink sweater and pale beige corduroys. Her hair was up and Sok Hoon was telling him a story of a woman on the phone and Sok Hoon made that gesture of her hand being the phone.
She bored you.
I was bored.
Well you bore yourself. No one else is responsible for your being bored.
He flipped down his sun visor. He was amazed at how well he could see his face.
David: Have you ever squeezed your nose.
Pause.
There’s a lot of oil in the nose. In every pore.
David scanned his nose. Then he looked at mine.
Youre not as bad, he said.
What are you talking about.
Architects Are Here Page 23
