Architects Are Here (20 page)

I grabbed the hand that was holding the fork. Youve got the kind of cheeks, I said, a gay man might have.

And David was surprised. Then he opened his mouth and laughed. You could see the chewed sausage in his mouth. He was like that god who eats his children, an articulate thug.

She was eighteen, David said. He wrenched free his hand. My father’s child, Gabe, you think about that the next time I talk about women and mindfucks.

Were these reasonable points of cause and effect.

The Hurleys, David said, adopted him.

Me:The Hurleys.

Old man Hurley.

I used to meet him, I said, on the Humber River, fishing. Loyola Hurley. The Hurley boys in a van with a moose bar. The plumbing company, we called him Cake.

Cake thought the kid was Joe’s. He loved kids.

And so I told him that Nell had mentioned this. That Nell’s son, with Dave’s father, had grown up with the Hurleys.

The very ones that nailed my father in a van with a moose bar.

You say moose bar with a certain vitriol.

There’s got to be a premeditation.

You mean a cause and an effect. Between your dad in hospital and Nell disappearing.

A connection. They rammed him intentionally.

But David had told me, on the phone, that it was his father’s fault. Randy Jacobs had told him that. I guess now David wasnt so sure. Gerard Hurley. We both knew him, we’d gone to school with him. Gerard had sold hash and was the first to use the metric system. The reason he used it was he could make more profit from cutting kilos into grams than pounds into ounces.

Me: And you think Nell would know.

Why disappear.

And I said I’d been thinking the same thing, only in my Wyoming state. It felt strange, I said, to be speaking it out loud to someone else. It made it more like an episode of a science fiction series.

Your Wyoming state. You want to elaborate on that.

I told him about Wyoming and then how death came in waves. When we were eighteen some of us were killed. Then recently friends were being killed again, cancer, the army, accidents. It felt like if you could get through the eighteen-year barrier you’d be okay for another eighteen years. The assassins come to the door in eighteen-year cycles.

Her Twombly son raised by Hurleys, David said. My half-brother. Anthony’s eighteen now. Stick that in your Wyoming.

I can do the math.

He’s a mixer for North Star Cement out by the Humber River.

You probably know his entire work history, I said.

And he did. He’d asked Massimo Sythe if he could use the IKW toolbox. From the toolbox he knew that Anthony assisted Loyola last winter stringing new wire through old outlets and that he’s used a pneumatic staple gun and he’s torched on roofs on Cobb Lane. What else. Anthony’s operated a backhoe when the men were on a lunch break. He’s taken apart the electric components to stoves and decoupled the coolant in freezers.

You know this, I said, because my youth was the same. You witnessed my youth.

Information, Gabe. Sales receipts, surveillance cameras, CPP contributions, vacation pay. Anthony is in the construction business.

I had applied for manual labour jobs because that is what my brother put down on the applications at manpower. I’ve mowed lawns and painted creosote fences and mixed plaster and combined gelcoat with hardener for fibreglass countertops. David did none of this. He’s never cut cords of birch and sharpened the chainsaw’s teeth or french-polished rocking chairs and sold wooden figurines at the craft shop up on the highway. When I was thirteen I took over my brother’s paper route with a hundred and seventy-four customers and I operated the trap shoot and sold a salmon I’d caught at six in the morning for twenty dollars to a man who saw me trying to fit it in the pannier of my bicycle. I’ve collected rifle cartridges and sold them as scrap metal just as I’ve sorted through my mother’s cash register at the Bank of Nova Scotia and replaced the pre-1967 quarters and dimes that have a high silver content. Dave made money by supplying code to machines.

This work has made us the people we are, and now the new work has created Anthony Hurley, a presence in the world that was causing David’s world to warp and revolve around his. Though one could argue it was not the work but the domestic background of Anthony Hurley that was offering a form of blowback.

One of the Polish men came over and it broke the narrow focus David had. The man was carrying a travel chess set in both hands. We will play, he said, for those shoes.

He was pointing with his chin to David’s shoes. He was standing too close and I had to get up and breathe something that didnt have David’s breath in it. I’m going to drive down, he said. You could come with me.

Me:Why would I do that.

For the drive. Your apartment’s burnt down, Nell is gone. It’ll clear your mind, he said.

I left him in his cavalry pants with the kolbasa on his fork, to play chess and keep his shoes.

But as I walked home I knew that I needed to get away. I hadnt gone to Cuba, in fact Cuba had come to me. Cuba had tried its best to crush me in bed. I needed a breath of air and one island was as good as another. And true, there is something masochistic in me that desired to be close to the man who had deceived me. Who had pretended to be my friend. No, that’s not right. He was a friend. He was wrestling with the facts. Or perhaps, as I’ve suggested, David Twombly was oblivious. Perhaps the affair with Nell meant nothing to him now, and he addressed me without any feelings of superiority. This all fascinated me, and I had no sense of pride or manly indignation. Those were old-fashioned positions to be jostled with in twentieth-century books. No, the truth is I did feel like ramming the barrel of a shotgun down his throat and pulling heavily on the trigger, but I also enjoyed resisting that urge, and coddling a restraint. This is not a book my father will enjoy.

TWELVE

D
AVID TWOMBLY WAS
, technically, an American. He had an American passport and he voted during American elections. His parents had moved to Newfoundland in the sixties. It was that great pulse of immigration to Canada, which had brought my family over. For Arthur Twombly, it was sympathy to those younger than himself in the States who were avoiding the draft. David’s mother found work at the US army base in Stephenville, she was a civilian lawyer for the army, and Arthur got established with the newly built college. They returned to the States for the summers and sabbaticals. They had Zac in Michigan and David was born in Stephenville, on the army base. This army base birth gives David, occasionally, the ambitious comfort that he could one day be president of the United States. He believed in a free market, he did not criticize, as his parents certainly did, American culture and expansionism. He was more like his grandfather, an internationalist who believed in trickle-down economics but had a good heart. The idea of Canada he found, in the end, to be one of a fifty-first state. While he was at McGill he did not think about Quebec separatism except in how it might facilitate the American absorption of Canada and Mexico. He took French. He was excited by developments, that he was living in an era of change. His peers were men and women about to be handed the reins of Canadian power, but he saw Canadian power as a diminished position. He was agreeable to the notion of insidious takeover. That Canada could retain its name, the way that an airline turned private can keep a country’s name, as long as it never raised an army against US trade law or foreign policy. He predicted a Canadian wing in the US military. His work encouraged software and special forces that Canada could provide for any American occupying force. And yet he donated ten percent of his salary to causes, as long as the causes were tax-deductible.

T
HEY FOLLOWED HIM HOME
. They cased him. They slid a back door open and took the keys. They were in David’s house. That’s the worst part, he said. Like I’d invite any of those guys back to my house.

But he was awake and aware. He’d called the police. He gave the police a good profile.

The convertible, I said, is not a good cross-country vehicle.

It’s a rental, he said. And what are you saying about my taste in automobiles.

I told him about buying a car that we could sell. Why be stuck in Newfoundland having to drive back. By that time, I said, your no-fly status will be cleared up and you can take air travel again.

Some hybrid, he said.

Me:Theyre expensive.

Hang the expense. No perhaps we should worry about expenses. I might have to go bankrupt, I was just meeting with my lawyer. What about one of those cars from India. One of those two-thousand-dollar cars where they use strong adhesives rather than welds.

Me:You want to drive around in a bamboo crate.

Theyre made with lightweight composites, Gabe. Theyre made with the same adhesives as airplanes.

Dave youre not going to find one of those cars around here.

There was a pause on the phone which meant I did not realize the world was a neighbourhood now. And perhaps with David’s connections he could order and import and license one of those Indian cars in three days. If he was going to go cheap, he wanted to go futuristic.

I’ll find a deal at
Auto Trader
. Let’s make a trip of it, I said.

He thought about that. What I want to drive, he said, is something state of the art.

B
UT THEN A DAY WENT BY
and he was against the whole thing. He’d rather spend his energy fighting the no-fly caution on his airport ID. That’s the other thing about David, an enthusiasm for any adventure that quickly burns off and an underlying force takes over.

But I felt trapped now in Toronto, without an apartment, with no Nell, and no reason to be here. So why not begin my summer early and purchase a car and drive. I was thinking about an Audi, like the one David’s dad had been creamed in. A boxy, foreign car good on gas and they depreciate slowly. But then I remembered the converted police cruiser, Zac’s car. Now that would have some hustle. A pursuit vehicle. What would it fetch in Newfoundland. Three grand. I walked to the library and looked it up online at the
Auto Trader
auction. Twice in the last three months Alice Stebbins has called Tessa Walcott and trimmed a hundred dollars off the asking price. She’s down to twenty-four hundred dollars. Tessa finds it odd when a client doesnt want to run the old photo. Though Alice has not asked for another photographer.

I went over to look at it. As a buyer.

The engine leaks oil, Alice Stebbins said.

Worn valves, I said.

Alice:Too many car chases.

She popped the hood and I lifted it and found the metal wand.

Or a tapered cylinder wall, I said.

We both stared hard at the engine.

That allows oil to enter the combustion chamber, I said. That’s what causes the oil burning.

I would take a loss on it if you factored in the miles per gallon. But she was desperate and had removed her reserve. A minimum bid. I could key in fifteen hundred dollars. I liked the idea of bringing something from Jane and Finch to Newfoundland. But I also wanted to make it a personal transaction, to hand Alice Stebbins cash on the spot, the old-fashioned way.

I
TRIED TO PUT ON HOLD
my new life in Toronto. I sent Nell another email, in case she was alive in that form. I warned her the apartment was gone, and that I had put in a claim to the landlord’s insurance company. I said I was going to make a trip with David. That we would talk about what happened and do the male thing and come out the end stronger for it. Bonding. That would make her terrified. She’d want to warn him.

I made a fist and touched the screen, which was her solar plexus. I brushed it with my knuckles. Youre not to do that Nell, I said quietly. I was pretending she stood before me.

N
EXT DOOR TO ME
at the Days Inn I saw Irene Loudermilk inserting her key card.

Hey, I said.

Neighbour.

Some fire.

Some love letter.

It had been Irene burning the love letter. It was a man who had made her move to Toronto in the first place, a man named Arnold Cream from Calgary who worked in oil and whose head offices relocated to Toronto during the Conservative years when Ontario’s provincial government loosened corporate tax regulations.

I’d never spent much time thinking about Irene Loudermilk. She was polite and sorted our mail on the stairs without its ever feeling snoopy. She was quiet and smoked a lot of pot and played guitar in a country-and-western band. She was older than Nell and me but she was still beautiful in a forty-five-year-old way. We sat at the hotel bar and had a drink and I realized beauty from the past can still visit in pulses and in fact could be a more vivid beauty for its gathering and diminishing returns. It made the present more urgent and vital. We knew nothing of each other, though she said she could hear a lot through the bathroom, that Nell and I argued a lot in the bathroom, or it could have been elsewhere but came to her through the bathroom.

I didnt know we argued.

You yelled at her a lot.

I yelled?

Irene rested her chin on the rim of her scotch. I hadnt seen a woman do that on a first drink. Did we argue or were we passionate? Was it about David Twombly or was it Nell assuming more of my inner life. You can be territorial when the country of your own thoughts is devoured by the one you love.

Irene Loudermilk had a whiteness around her eyelids and her nostrils were flared from drug use or just a lot of colds. I realized I hadnt looked at her before and she was interesting. She did interesting things with her fingers when she spoke and she wore a topaz belt buckle that flashed as she leaned in and out from the bar with her elbows. It was as if she held a map on the bar and was pointing things out, a map of emotional terrain. She’d had a child when she was sixteen, she said, and then met Arnold and he urged her to give the baby up so that they could start anew. I was astonished at how close her story was to Nell’s. It was a terrible mistake, Irene said. They lived Arnold’s life for twenty years. He forgot completely about her early sacrifice and did not understand how the friction between them resulted from his wrong-headed starting gate. But even so Irene stuck by him and moved out east when his office relocated (to Irene, Toronto was the East Coast). But then Arnold’s mandate at work was revised and he was more often in Alberta than he’d been when they lived in Calgary. He visited junior oil companies outside Red Deer, there were drilling services and regulatory bodies he had to negotiate with inside the shale till zone of small pocket reserves. They were living in Richmond Hill and, even during the ten years they lived there, the place became unrecognizable to them.