Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

We ate a fin and feather supper, then we set up the tent on his father’s grave. Or what was to be his grave. No one had ever been buried in it. We stretched out and became corpses. Or at least that’s how I felt. I slept as deep as I’d had since Nell left and the apartment blew up and we’d taken this return to home. It was important to have someone, and all I had was David. That seemed enough. I loved him. We’d wronged each other but when it comes to love these errors dont seem to affect a deep connection. I admired his breathing. I enjoyed whatever is the flare that is will and desire. Usually he was quick to sleep, whereas I took a half-hour and swore at the hardness of the foamy. What I loved was being alive and not being the only person alive. That would be lonely. This night I managed to get to sleep before him, and I knew it. I knew he was awake while I slept, I had left him alone in the world.

  I woke up to a backhoe and the police. They were digging up a thirty-year-old grave. To get DNA evidence. I watched three men from forensics uncover teeth. They were in remarkable condition, the gums in fact were still on them. Then I saw they were dentures. There was nothing left in the damp ground. But then they found hair. A clump of it. There were hairclips in it. The plastic and hair was all that remained. I heard one of the men say he’d found a moustache once, attached to a skull.

  EIGHT

  WE DROVE BACK into Corner Brook and took the arterial road that bypassed the city and led us into Benoit’s Cove and Mount Moriah. It was the road David’s father had used when he was hit by the Hurley van. We stopped at the turnoff and David looked up the road to where the van had come and you could still see the skid marks. So they had braked. The tire marks had been measured and the speed calculated and what had been in the police report was accurate.

  We drove further down the shore, past the beaches where we caught caplin at night with dip nets, we drove into Bottle Cove and found Anthony Hurley in his girlfriend’s back yard, fixing a white outboard motor beside a shed that had a schooner mural along one end. Anthony had the motor, a Johnson 6, clamped on the side of a woodhorse, with the propeller stuck in a five-gallon bucket of water. Every few minutes he’d pull it over and twist the throttle on the handle and froth and smoke spewed out of the bucket. We watched him from the car for about a half-hour. Anthony’s dog in the back of a green truck, running from wheel well to corner, no tailgate on back. It made me think of Bucephalus, how good a dog she was and how goodness got her nowhere.

  And then David made a move.

  Anthony.

  Hey boys.

  He bolted. And Dave ran him down by the fence, twisted Anthony’s arm behind and up, as if he was scratching his own back. He hauled him to the motor.

  Bend your knees, Anthony.

  Fuck off Twombly.

  That’s some scar.

  I started the chainsaw up on my kneecap.

  Didnt you get stitches.

  I let the dog lick it for an hour.

  Dave jammed Anthony’s arm in the bucket.

  Now you tell us what happened, Anthony. Or we’re going to have to take this little Johnson for a spin.

  Take the fucking arm. Take everything. You got everything already. What did I get. Take the arm. Go on you asshole. I want you to take the arm.

  David let him go. So you were driving.

  I hate your guts. I hate your friend’s guts. I want you to give me a good going over. I want you to feel real proud of yourselves. Come on the two of you beat the snot out of me.

  He looked just like Zac. I couldnt help but feel we were talking to David’s older brother. Anthony was just eighteen and Zac was about that age when he drowned. It was hard not to feel sorry for him, and David was totally surprised. He was surprised at how quickly his feelings were changing.

  Okay, David said. So you want to run me over too.

  I’d love to crush your chest.

  He was driving the van. It was Anthony, not Gerard. He’d meant to shake him up and the fact that it was more serious than that was an accident. I’m not into putting people in the hospital, Anthony said.

  He was leaning up against the side of his girlfriend’s overturned boat. He had been sanding it.

  Your mother, David said. Youve fucked her up. Youve wrecked everything between you and her and your father.

  And Anthony started to laugh. You dont understand, he said. I got no one. There’s no one except me here. There is no mother and father.

  Dave, I said. He’s got a point. I mean he’s got a point.

  David looked around at what he had. The position he was in. He wanted to let off some arsenal inside himself and yet there was nothing to aim at. It was true. Look at him. Look at Anthony.

  I just wanted to meet you and Gerard, David said, and make sure nothing was like a vendetta or anything. Because by rights you both belong in a furnace.

  And then something else possessed them. Some brotherly formation crowded in and took them over. They were brothers for god’s sakes. They were of the same blood. Or they were father and son. They both felt it. Can you take us on a little tour of the property, David said.

  I was quite blown away by Dave’s ability to become another energy. And Anthony walked us in past his girlfriend’s house. He showed us the property that he personally had cut out of the woods. I need a culvert for here, he said. And David said he knew of a culvert. We could get you a culvert right now, he said. Or at least spot one for you and tuck it away for nightfall.

  That sounds like a plan, Anthony said.

  WE DROVE TOWARDS ST JUDES. And when we got there Anthony said, You know that Joe is dead.

  Yes, David said, we know.

  Joe had been killed in Afghanistan. David and I had known a lot of men and some women in the army, men in the navy and a NATO petty officer in Landstuhl and personnel stationed in Goose Bay and mostly guys we went to school with who had to find a way to pay for an education and now were in ground forces or were working for service industries contracted out by Bechtel and Halliburton. Some of those men and women were coming home dead. Joe Hurley had arrived in the belly of a Hercules aircraft at Stephenville, and Anthony went to the funeral with Gerard and his father. My own father had gone to the funeral. Joe Hurley was the funniest brother, Anthony said, and he had been decorated in the air cadets and his father had those decorations in a glass cabinet. An aluminum coffin draped in a Canadian flag. It was like the flag they flew over the baseball diamond when Anthony, as a kid, had marched around the infield with troops of cadets that Joe directed. Joe had let him oil his rifle and when it rained Joe let them march around the red line in a Salvation Army gymnasium, where the marching echoed off the basketball nets. Anthony Hurley respected his older brother because Joe had won several ribbons and one trophy in St John’s at a shooting meet when he was Anthony’s age. Joe Hurley had become a captain in the army and he knew how to carry himself over monkey bars, he could do chin-ups until you were tired of counting them. He had bright black hair that was shaved down to a crewcut which was unfair as it was beautiful hair. Anthony had not known him with long hair. Imagine, he hadnt had long hair since he was sixteen. He got his ears flicked on the school bus. Anthony enjoyed the comic, but being funny was not an option. His tongue might have been a little too big for his mouth, he had a lisp he would grow out of. But he was popular and he managed to override the lisp. No one made fun of him. He remembers Joe in training, when they sent him into the woods for thirteen days with a canister of water. The machines they learned and techniques for living. Joe told Anthony, when he was posted to Afghanistan with a US-led force, that they werent peacekeepers any more. I just hope, Joe said, I get to use my training. All of it. Except I dont want to kill anybody.

  Joe Hurley was dead now and his body was brought home for burial in St Judes. He was thirty-six. There was a colour photo of him on the coffin and he was wearing fatigues and a sun hat.

  His father got up to say something. I talked to Joe every week, Loyola Hurley said. When he’s up on the webcam it’s just like youre sitting down talking to hi
m.

  In high school it was the Russians who were dying in Afghanistan. We played volleyball in the gym and twice a year there were drills to prepare for a nuclear war. We rolled the volleyballs into a corner then pressed our backs up against the cold wall of the gym. The Russians had a missile aimed at our high school and we had to know how to limber up before a practice and keep our body frames pressed against a load-bearing wall. We’d seen those Red Square parades in the snow, the columns of flatbed trucks carrying warheads. Even their hockey team was named after an army.

  My father telling me we will live in the park. What will happen is Russian families will sleep in our beds. There will be perhaps ten or twelve people living with us or we will be sleeping in the park in tents. That’s communism, he said. We’ll have no money. You’ll walk everywhere. But it was sleeping in the park that did it. All of Corner Brook lying down together under the birch trees, hoping it doesnt rain.

  WE DROVE ALONG THE HIGHWAY towards Deer Lake and Anthony did not look at David. David drove. I was stretched out in the back seat of the Matador. We were going to get a culvert and roll it across the road and hide it in the ditch. Then come back in the dark with Anthony’s truck and haul it home. Somehow we’d come away from the idea of personal injury to personal gain. David was going to help Anthony out with a culvert for his girlfriend’s driveway. I could tell Dave hadnt made up his mind about the accident. If it was an accident. I could tell though that he wanted to drive deep into enemy territory and stare at the landscape from their eyes.

  We passed a motley herd of sheep outside of St Judes. They were Hurley sheep. They looked cold. No they won’t freeze on you, Anthony said. They might starve on you if you got them barred up. But if theyre in the woods they won’t starve. Won’t freeze either.

  They’d saved the sheep. They were skinny with not much fat. Yes theyre small but theyre sure-footed.

  He was proud of their sheep. They got a barn but they prefer it outside. They get fed outside. They got water on every pasture, they got shelter. They got kelp from the ocean.

  We drove down a side road where we’d buried the dog out near Deer Lake, but the culvert was gone now. It had been moved or used already. There’s another one, David said. I saw it up by the power station.

  This was news to me. So we turned around and drove further up to the power station. The turbines generate electricity that’s then shipped by transmission lines to the pulp mill in Corner Brook. This transmission of power made Anthony want to communicate. He said Gerard was driving the van and that, yes, Gerard was upset with Arthur Twombly. At first it was his wife, Helen. Because she’s the lawyer for the mill. She’s got all those land claims for the pulp mill and also for the extension of the park. And then that transferred over to Arthur when they adopted me. They figured it out early on that I wasnt Joe’s son, but they didnt care. Though they took Arthur’s money. So when he stopped paying that, because of what happened with the land sold to him, well then that’s when Gerard got upset. As far as I know it wasnt intentional to run into your father. But youre powerful in a van. Youre high up. Youve got the moose bar on the front. You can be aggressive. You can hurtle.

  They meant to scare him, I said. He was turning when he shouldnt turn and Gerard didnt want to yield. He thought, fuck that. Fuck you old man. Then he lurched right into their lane. He couldnt swerve away.

  They looked at me as though I had come close to the truth.

  David:The cops said Gerard tried to swerve away.

  Anthony: Between you and me because we’re brothers, Gerard didnt do enough early on and I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry for your loss.

  He was a youngster and he was tough but he still knew a tragedy.

  Our father hasnt gone anywhere, David said.

  He slowed as a blue minivan was on the side of the highway. A couple in sun hats kneeling with a camera. For some reason it made David want to pull over.

  Let’s see what theyre shooting.

  They were Americans. The plates on their Winnebago said Michigan. My home state, David said to them.

  Tourist:Youre from Michigan.

  I could be President, David said. And this here man could be the King.

  There’s a moose in there, the man said. And he pointed to the woods. His wife showed us the camera, on it a male with a huge rack.

  Youre handy with that camera.

  We never thought we’d see something like that, the man said.

  Arent you from Michigan.

  Never seen a moose in Michigan.

  We got back in the car. We were five minutes away from that culvert.

  Boys what say we go moose hunting.

  Anthony:We should at least go have a look for him.

  Do we have a licence, I said.

  Dont you have one, David said.

  It’s not for this area, I said.

  Isnt this close enough?

  It was obvious the moose had taken the transmission line and so we just darted into the next wood’s road up ahead. It was Lady Slipper Road. David took it. As he sunk into potholes he reached across Anthony and pulled open the glove box.

  Load up the Lee Enfield, he said.

  Anthony:Youre going to have to get close with the outfit you got there.

  He passed the box of bullets back to me, as there was more room in the back and it was my rifle.

  Your old man like a piece of moose?

  Anthony: Dad would find a spot to hang it.

  I want to bring old Cake Hurley a gift.

  It was disrespectful, that. That David would say Cake with Anthony there. It was like how he’d spoken to the president. He should have said Loyola. Anthony looked like he’d taken a lot of that kind of hardship.

  Moose love cherry, Anthony said. Lots of it around here.

  We drove in around a pulp log booth that wedged logs on the backs of paper-mill trucks. There was a fork where a big new pickup was parked. Two Micmac guys sat on the end of an open tailgate, they were quiet and cold, staring at some tremendous beams they’d cut, maybe six inches square and thirty feet long. Ends painted red. Anthony knew them but they did not even nod. The road was getting bad. David rolled down the window.

  Can we get in any further?

  There’s a couple cabins in there, one said.

  Can we get as far as the transmission line in this?

  That’ll get you halfway there.

  We drove past their pickup. And in the bed was the product of their own poaching: eight quarters of caribou wrapped in gauze, a grey hoof pointing up from each sack. A discreet pink showed through the gauze, a wet pink of cured ham or feldspar, like a skinned knee. The hooves looking for their slippers. How a dog’s hind leg will investigate the living room as he’s asleep on his back.

  We drove down a steep slope but halfway down Dave slammed on the brakes and we pulled tight against our seatbelts. There was the transmission line. And a moose shaking the woods off his antlers.

  Pass up that rifle, Gabe.

  I shovelled the gun in between the seats and Dave removed the rubber caps off the sight lenses. He got out and leaned across the roof, his elbows thumping on the roof. I could see the moose through the windshield, he was lifting his head high to scent us. Then swung his neck again, and up. He snorted. A swivelling of weight in his chest which caused his front legs to twist and turn in the marsh. He was beautiful. What’ll those tourists think, I thought, when they hear this go off.

  Dave’s hips were hugging the hinges of the door. The moose stopping to turn and look, I guess, right at him. It seemed the car exploded, but it was the rifle firing and when youre inside a vehicle with the doors flung open that sound is very loud. Then something hard hit the roof and then scraped down the front window. Dave had dropped the rifle. The window smeared with blood.

  Oh now that’s not right.

  David was kneeling at the driver’s door staring at his hands. He was covered in blood. He was wiping away bits of tissue and hair from his fingers.

 
Something went wrong there Gabe, he said. His cheeks flecked with blood.

  Are you fucking wounded.

  Just take a look for me on the other side of the car, he said.

  I checked for Anthony. He wasnt in the car. His door was swung open.

  Then I saw the wet mess on the door window. Matter and hair. I pushed forward the passenger seat and climbed out.

  Dave, I said.

  Anthony was on the ground face first. He was stretching out with one hand and the other he had on the back of his neck. He had no head to speak of. Then a piece of his head on the hard mud.

  David: I didnt see him.

  Anthony must have been getting out.

  The scope the fucking scope why do you have a gun with a fixed scope.

  Yeah the scope is what killed him.

  This is bad news, Dave said. This is the wrong thing altogether.

  This is not good.

  I’ve been doing not good things, he said, all my life.

  He bent over his brother and looked at him and then he sat beside him and exhaled loudly and wiped his face with his sleeve. Then he put a hand on him and gave him a little wake-up pat. We should have rolled him over but he had no face and we did not want to see his absent face.

  It was an accident, he said.

  What do you mean.

  It wasnt something I meant to do.

  Dave you didnt see him.

  I dont think I saw him. I’m just not sure any more what I’m doing.

  Tell me you didnt see him.

  I’m a little confused here, Gabe.

  He shook his head and pushed his finger and thumb into the corner of his eyes. He stared at his brother.

  So what do we do, he said.

  Youre saying it like we have a choice.

  Do we move him or do we leave him and get help or does one of us stay here.

  We put him in the car, I said.

  No we leave him right where he’s to.

  The moose was still there, watching us, very alive. I did not look at David or his brother any more. I just stood there and stared at the moose and breathed out a few times. I was disgusted with my part in this. It was a nice fall day, we should have been enjoying ourselves.