Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  That sounds like a motto.

  On Maggie’s fridge was a drinks recipe list. The last line was “add more tequila.”

  It began to rain. You could hear it on the roofs of cars parked out back. I love the rain, David said. Doesnt matter where I am or whose rain it is.

  You laugh, Gwen said, even though you dont have a sense of humour.

  How you doing.

  I’m living a dream, mister.

  Maggie: I’ve got a story to tell you but you wouldnt believe it.

  Oh come on tell us.

  No, you wouldnt believe it. Otherwise I’d tell you.

  We’ll believe it.

  The reason I went out with Gerard was so I could hang out with Gwen.

  Speaking of Gerard, David said. How do we get ahold of him.

  FIVE

  I DROVE DOWN to St Judes alone. I wanted to talk to Loyola Hurley the way that I talked to him when we were alone on the river. It was a compulsion to use youthful connections. If David was with me another type of conversation would happen. Gerard was staying at home with Loyola, Gwen said. Gerard worked for the plumbing business, that was his front.

  I knew Mr Hurley from those early mornings on the Humber River. I called him Mr Hurley. Perhaps it was the time of day and the place where we met, but he seemed to be a person then. He tied his own flies, as I did, and if we met before sun-up he’d share his flask of black tea and unclasp his case of flies. I liked the cup on the top of the flask, it was tin, and I’d never had tea without milk before. My father liked the Hurleys. He taught them, and he knew of Mr Hurley in the woods. My father preferred these families, the ones who were directly from the bay, rather than the families who had moved to Corner Brook eighty years before, to exploit the paper mill. There is something different in the character, he said. There is something safe and conservative about the paper-mill workers, the shelter of a boring and cautious union. That caution helps build infrastructure, like regional hospitals. We are all born now in regional hospitals. We die in them too.

  I slowed through St Judes, which is built along the highway. Once, someone had painted a crosswalk. For laughs. Then I saw the Hurley house, the new addition and the white van in front. I slowed down and parked on the grade. I didnt want to park on Hurley property, or get boxed in.

  I stood there and looked at the Hurleys’. I looked at the white van. The dented moose bar on the grille. Behind the van was an open garage door and beside the house was a scarecrow in a field of potatoes, an early crop that was dying back already, others still dark and healthy. The scarecrow was sitting in a chair, as if the Hurleys were trying to make him comfortable. But then it wasnt a scarecrow. It was Loyola Hurley in a wheelchair.

  I crossed the highway and walked into the yard and then up to the potato field.

  I lost a foot, he said, to diabetes.

  But he wasnt letting the wheelchair slow him down. He was getting around as good as ever.

  They swiped two kitchen sinks off me, he said. So now I have Loyola Hurley written on the fridge in blue paint. With a phone number on the side.

  I helped him into the kitchen where Gerard Hurley was sitting drinking a beer. He had a reciprocating saw on the table in front of him. He was taking it apart and staring at each part with his bright blue eyes. Cold. He looked less masculine. Something about less hair on his face, a weak chin. I opened the fridge. It had the scent of mould. It was warm inside.

  Gerard: How much is a water pump, Dad? Sixty?

  Loyola: Sixty? Try sixty and sixty and sixty and sixty and sixty.

  Me:Why is your fridge not working.

  I unplugged it, Loyola said. It was making too much noise.

  Me: Didnt there used to be a basketball court out here?

  That attracted every kid in St Judes, Loyola said. I didnt need to hear the language.

  Then he knew I must have a nervous sense about me, with Gerard in the room. He said, I feel bad for David’s father, for what happened to him. Accident as it was. I was hit last year by three teenagers on drugs.

  With sticks, Gerard said.

  Police asked me questions like, had I at all enticed the boys during the summer.

  Well they paid for that, Gerard said.

  Loyola wheeled over to the sink and put a net bag of potatoes in there to rinse. They had laid out the garden so he could get in there with his wheelchair. He found a cutworm. It had an orange shell. He smashed it in his hand and a yellow puss sluiced out. They attack the peas, Loyola said. Even though theyre in the potatoes.

  My neighbour, Loyola said, he’s a lawyer. His wife too. Two lawyers. He came over to me last month, said if I put that tree out City Hall would take it away. It was the Christmas tree from last year. It had blown up against the fence and I’d been meaning to cut it up and burn it. So fuck off, I said. Well the boys here got on a tear. And one night after I’d gone to bed Gerard hooked up lights and dressed up the tree right here in the yard. Next afternoon I was taking it all down and the neighbour comes home. He says Loyola, you know what you are? Youre like something out of Pippi Longstocking. What? I said. She would do that, have Christmas in July.

  Then Loyola looked at me as if he wanted me to ask what I’d come to ask.

  David just wants to talk to Gerard, I said.

  Gerard has got his own life, he said.

  I’ll talk to Dave, Gerard said. I got a few things to ask him myself.

  I PICKED UP DAVID and he wanted to get behind the wheel. He had been drinking.

  You shouldnt drive, I said. Not that you can’t, but if youre pulled over you won’t pass.

  David: I’m too drunk to walk.

  So I drove and David tried his best to look sober, even though he wasnt driving. I think maybe he thought he was driving. He looked like he was concentrating on the road but then you saw that he was thinking hard about something else. If he thought about the road he would not stay on it. He had to let the animal part of him, the part not affected by alcohol, drive. Even though I was driving. I told him what happened out in St Judes. But he had something else on his mind. Gwen Hurley and Maggie Pettipaw.

  You often, David said, talk about women the way women want men to talk about them.

  We parked on Main Street. In a shop window men’s suits were pinned to the wall at an angle, the ankles gathered together to points, as though suits were being shot from a can, like tennis balls. David was deciding what to do. He was both patient and anxious.

  David:What time do you think it is.

  You mean without looking at my watch.

  David looked at my wrist and it was seven oclock. We were walking back to the parking lot behind Maggie’s. Above us the hospital, with Arthur Twombly in it.

  When I was a child, David said, they used to put up a string of Christmas lights in the bedroom. Zac called them sicky lights. Because when I was sick I got to stay home and stare at the lights.

  We could see Gwen Hurley out on Maggie’s patio, bent under a table to light a cigarette. Wind trouble. And the history of the Hurleys was in her very character. We said hello to Gwen Hurley and then kept walking, up to the hospital, to see Arthur Twombly. David’s pebble went off. Sok Hoon, he said. And he listened. And the murmur of Sok Hoon sounded like she was saying she still loved David, and yet she agreed with David about grasping after beauty. They both believe, as I do, that you can allow beauty to walk beside you. She was telling him about Owen, about the school.

  David said, I can’t say in good faith that things are over between us.

  I believed him tender and then, as he hung up, I heard him clear his voice. He cleared his throat and began putting more effort into walking up the hill.

  They had the roof of the hospital open and that crane was lowering in a new generator. It was the only way to get it into the basement, was to sink it through the roof, and it reminded me of a riddle my father used to say when I was a child: You remind me of a man. What man. Man power. What power. Power of voodoo. Voodoo? You do. I do what. Remind me
of a man.

  And the voodoo brought back the Buddha I had watched get lifted into the new temple in Toronto. The Buddha and this generator, they were both doing the same job.

  Did I ever tell you, I said to David, I once read in a hospital to patients who had half their blood outside their bodies?

  David:Was that like a big magic trick?

  ARTHUR TWOMBLY MUST HAVE heard some of this. Magic trick. It was echoing down a long corridor and into a room with high rafters. The sound of voices had no bass and the treble broke up—it was mainly vowels he heard. It sounded Spanish and so he went to Madrid. Arthur remembered a train that carried Richard Text and Joe Hurley. There was a magic trick. They drank in the bar, the low oval windows flashing scenes of dry fields. Sunflowers all turned to the sun. A man wore a coloured bead necklace and had a groove in his skull and a bump from the bullet of a .38. He was drinking clamato vodka with oysters and he stood up holding an oyster to do a trick. How to get a coin beneath a beer cap, inside the cap. The coin was very light. He ate the oyster then put his hand up to his forehead to concentrate. He stroked the groove in his skull. The beer cap moved off and the coin flipped into the cap. He must have been breathing out through his nose. I’m breathing through my nose, Arthur Twombly realized. There’s a tube in my nose.

  He knew we were there. Or a presence was near him, as you can feel the heat of hands that have been rubbed together and placed an inch away from your face. It is good to visit the unconscious.

  SIX

  SLOW IT, DAVE SAID. Okay put it in park. I’m going to give his door a knock.

  He walked up the driveway past the white van worth about eleven hundred dollars. He pulled up his jeans. There was a child’s pink skipping rope looped over the bars of a banana bike. He unharnessed the rope and tested it. It was rubberized plastic. He looked at the van, then he yanked off the rope handles. He leaned against the back of the van and peered through the rope tubing. He walked into the driveway and found a bucket in the garage. He nudged it with his toe. A galvanized pail. The garage door was slightly down now and on the door was spray-painted in red:

  THE ONLY VEHICLE FOR PRISON REFORM IS A BULLDOZER

  THERE IS NO JUSTICE ON STOLEN LAND

  David walked back to the van and opened the driver’s door. The pop of the lever for the gas lid. He shut the door. He opened the hinged lid and twirled off the gas cap.

  I leaned out the passenger window and said, Dave.

  Fuck off for one second.

  He fed the skipping rope down into the tank. Then he knelt on one knee and sucked. He sucked hard on the end and looked right at me. It was a narrow hole through the rope and I thought perhaps it wouldnt work but then his cheeks were surprised with gasoline and he spat it out. He put his thumb over the rope end. He dragged over the pail and let a stream of gasoline spray into the pail. He knelt over, siphoning the gas in until Gerard Hurley came out of the screen door pulling on a white T-shirt and asked him what the hell he was doing.

  I’m looking for you.

  Everyone’s looking for me.

  David stood with the gasoline. He tapped the bottom of it. He looked over at me. Then he slewed it over Gerard Hurley. He decided to chuck the pail at his head too. It clanged off the door behind him as Gerard had crouched and jumped. They were sprawled now on the driveway. I got out of the car to assist. But David had used the force of falling and rolled Gerard over. He had him pinned, with a knee under his chin. Dave produced a lighter and merrily lit it.

  I’m looking for the guy, he said, who put my father in hospital.

  If youre all looking for him, Gerard said, then you havent found him.

  Then Gerard gave a short punch into David’s armpit and David reeled off him and Gerard pounced on him and put him in a headlock and squeezed until I heard a neckbone crack. Then he got off of David and let him up. You want Anthony you crazy motherfucker. It was Anthony who drove into your father. The cops dont know nothing.

  SEVEN

  I DROVE DAVID to his mother’s house, he was shaking and laughing now. We each had a glass of whisky and then I drove home and went to bed early. I slept with the whisky on my teeth in the room that was my childhood room. The whisky numbed the broken molar. I remembered living in a house in Trepassey, south of St John’s. This was when I first started to write. It was in winter. I wrote with my feet stuck in the oven of the woodstove. One day in May a polar bear was spotted off the coast. He was standing, perplexed, on a little sheet of ice. Heading south. Trepassey is the most southerly tip of Newfoundland and there is no land again until you hit Cuba. The polar bear realized this and was getting nervous. Late in the day he slipped off the ice. We saw him swimming for shore. We barred our doors. I woke up the next morning and put the stove in and noticed a change in the light in the room. In the window a shape, then the white fur, these big paws at the window.

  They caught him that day, tranquilized by Wildlife. They phoned in a chopper. He was so beautiful and big and fast asleep. They wrapped him in a net but as they were loading him under the helicopter he fell out of the netting. He hit his head. His jaw. He’s broken some teeth, a biologist said. We’ll have to get that seen to.

  They kept the bear sedated and brought him to the local dentist. The dentist put in a crown for the polar bear.

  I woke early with my jaw hammering. It was five-thirty. My parents would be up in an hour. I made some coffee and two slices of toast with butter. I took a painkiller. This waking up early made me philosophical and introspective. It was also quiet. I could walk out to the car and sit in it and turn on the radio, which felt like a rich act. That’s where I ate my toast, the slices of toast sitting on my lap. It was like living on another planet but being able to tune into home. The sounds of a radio are very much like a house. You can build a house in your mind around the soft atmosphere of a car radio. But often I wanted to deprive myself of that leash. I wanted to roam the mornings in the air of dawn cracking open the lid of the night, the hinges of the dark lid still clapped down on the western sky. I still wore a watch. I marked the passage of these impressions and then I realized I had opened up into my Wyoming and that I hadnt done that in a while. I took the keys out of my pocket, the keys of my old apartment mixed with the Matador’s key and the key to my bike lock and one for the trigger lock of the Lee Enfield in the trunk. I knew what Owen meant about opening things. It was satisfying to open a lock.

  The Matador has a soft rumble as gas explodes in the cylinders. They dont make engines like that any more. It was still summer but it was so early that it was chilly and I turned on the heater. Then I drove out onto the road and drove down to pick up David. He wanted us to drive out to Rocky Harbour for the day. He wanted to see a cemetery. The doctors were not happy with Arthur Twombly’s condition. You might, Dr Manamperi had said to David, want to prepare yourselves.

  So now we have to find Anthony, David said. Before I kill anyone I want to make sure I’m killing the right one.

  But even as he said that I sensed he was excited, he was full of loathing and respect for the Hurleys. They were living a provincial life, a small life that he respected. His own worldliness he often despised.

  The truth is, Gabe, just a little bit of roughhousing calms me down. I dont want to kill Gerard any more. Gerard is a waste of time. He’s small. He’s not worth the effort.

  But it was Dave’s neck that almost cracked off, it wasnt Gerard’s. Though I was realizing that David had perhaps let Gerard roll him. Gerard was no longer that big a man. He had become dissipated, through bad food and drugs.

  We drove around the Bay of Islands, along the Humber River. David wanted to see about a plot of land in Rocky Harbour. That’s where his father wanted to be buried. We leaned down to look up at the Man in the Mountain. He looked like a man who would sweep your chimney or sharpen knives. One summer I was hired, with three others, to cross the river and climb that hill and find the Man in the Mountain and accentuate his face. Tourists couldnt pick him out. But when we
got harnessed and rappelled up there and spiked ourselves into the rock, the face dissolved. We were too close to see anything.

  We passed the Big Stop Irving in Deer Lake and drove north into Bonne Bay and then Gros Morne park. My father, David said, wants to be buried down there.

  We steered into Rocky Harbour and the first person David saw he pulled over.

  How do you go about buying a place in the graveyard?

  That would be Father Mulcahy.

  We found a parish house and knocked on the door and a woman answered. She said Father Mulcahy had overdosed on a pain medication, in an attempt to prove there was a vengeance against him. There wasnt any vengeance, he was just sick of Rocky Harbour and the rumour about him that involved a young girl.

  It’s a woman, Gladys Conway, who arranges the plots, she said.

  We found Gladys Conway. She was a big woman, her husband was out back puttering around and he was half her size. Gladys said there was a simple form for that. She had one in a kitchen drawer. It had been photocopied over and over from the original so the text was fuzzy and bits of extra markings from the lid of the photocopier had been repeatedly copied onto fresh applications. It cost four hundred and nine dollars plus tax for a plot of land in Rocky Harbour. Can we go see it. She said it would be the plot nearest to a man named Thomas Guinchard.

  We walked over and up into the meadow of the graveyard. There were no trees back here. If you lay down on the meadow you could still see the ocean, that’s what Arthur Twombly wanted. There was a copse of pine trees near the bluff and a soft spot between some bedrock. David bought the plot next to Thomas Guinchard and signed an agreement that allowed a hundred and fifteen dollars to be withdrawn on his visa annually for maintenance and upkeep.

  Guinchard, I said. Lars Pony’s wife was a Guinchard.

  We got in the car and stared back up the hill at the meadow where his father would be laid to rest.

  Let’s camp here tonight, Dave said.