Measuring Up

by Dan Robson

  By now, after a couple of inches, the water in the hole seems to have stopped rising. It doesn’t look as though it’s going to flood into the basement, as I first thought. I decide to put my faith in Matt’s lack of concern.

  We’ve marked out a thick line from the drain to the toilet hole. The plan is to drill directly along the line, digging out a trench so that we can lay a new pipe beneath the floor. We’ll use the jackhammer along each edge of the line, pushing the bit inward and pulling up the concrete as the trench begins to form.

  For the next hour we work like a production line—one person drilling down with the jackhammer, the next working behind him to break up the concrete with the sledgehammer, the one behind him digging deeper with a shovel, and the fourth sweeping up the debris. We rotate through the roles every ten minutes or so.

  Tim is easily our best concrete buster. He is Thor in loafers. When the trench swerves to cut across to the vanity on the other side of the room, he skips his turn with the jackhammer and instead uses the sledgehammer to bash up the concrete all the way to the other side. The rest of us stand back and watch. Tim lands a blow pretty much every other second—connecting, then winding up and hammering again. The wooden frames of the walls around us shake with each thud that echoes through the basement like thunder.

  “Whoa!” I say appreciatively as Tim pauses for a moment. Then he starts hammering back in the other direction, double time.

  Finally he stops and takes a deep breath. “Whew…” he says.

  “How you feeling?” I ask, laughing.

  The sledgehammer drops to the floor.

  “Tired,” he huffs.

  “You can skip that workout today, eh?”

  “Heh, yeah,” he says, still catching his breath.

  He slams the hammer down one more time, shaking the thick membrane between the damp earth beneath us and the dry warmth of our home. Each crack in the concrete exposes this place to the hidden elements. The foundation feels less steady—penetrable. As though the house is vulnerable to the mud and trash that my father had always kept out.

  The brown water rises over the edge and spreads across the floor.

  12

  It’s a strange thing to track down your father’s ex-girlfriend. It’s not something I ever imagined myself doing. And it’s stranger still when his old best friend is sitting at the kitchen table beside her. But this is where the search for Dad-before-me has led.

  Carol Taylor knows a lot about my life. She’s still good friends with my aunt Debbie (who we’ve always called Auntie B because we pronounced her name as Aunt-De-Bee when we were kids). She’s kept her up to date on all my life’s developments. My aunt is the kind of person who stays connected to the past. I find it endearing. Hearing Carol tell me stories about myself feels like the relaying of Auntie B’s love.

  Carol was my father’s teenage sweetheart. She must have arrived sometime after whoever it was Bill Plunket remembers him dating. But she’s the only girlfriend of his I’d ever heard about from his past life. Her name was Carol Sheppard back then.

  Dad’s best friend was Dale Taylor. He was part of the crew who’d met at Beatty-Fleming Public School and would go camping in backyards and pool hopping in the middle of the night. He was one of the kids who burned the barn down. Probably one of the ones who ran through the cornfield, although he can’t recall. Dale was the drummer in the band—and the only one to actually stick with it. He still plays in a band today.

  Carol and Dale came to Dad’s funeral together, even though they’ve been divorced for several years now. (I didn’t know them, so I didn’t see them there.) They have two grown sons, one of whom plays in a band, just like his dad. They’re the kind of divorced couple that still sits in the kitchen together. That’s where they are when Carol answers the phone and tells me about the first time she saw Rick Robson.

  It was at Central Peel Secondary. She was in grade nine and he was in grade ten. It was the first day of school.

  “I was at the top of the stairs and he and his friends were at the bottom. And he had this striped shirt with purple in it,” Carol says. “He had the blondish hair. He was so nice looking.”

  They went to either a dance or a concert together, she says, though she can’t remember much about it. Dale assures me that it was indeed a dance, because he was there.

  “Carol says she liked Rick because of his blond hair. Or whatever,” Dale says. “And of course, it’s no secret that I liked Carol too.”

  Dad and Carol started dating soon after that, and would be together for nearly a decade, through all those magnified years of adolescence.

  “He was like…oh, you know what he was like,” Carol says. “He was the sweetest guy ever.”

  She tells me about coming over to my father’s house as a teenager, at first too afraid to go up the stairs from the front-door landing. But soon she was there all the time. She remembers my uncle, who was about three at the time. And my grandmother, who was sweet, like Rick, and made the best roast pork with cauliflower. They had dinner at the Robsons every Sunday. And she remembers my grandfather, who seemed intimidating at first but was always sweet to her.

  At the end of that first year they dated, my grandfather decided he wanted to take the above-ground pool they had in the backyard and put it below ground. Much of that task fell to my father, who was not very happy about it. He spent most of the summer digging out an enormous hole.

  “A couple of times we’d want to see each other, but he’d say, ‘My dad is making me dig the pool,’ ” Carol tells me. “I think his dad had him do a lot of work, and he didn’t quite like that.”

  Dale remembers that part too. He helped dig the hole. (When it was finally done they even scrawled their names in paint on the metalwork around the edge.) It was the only way Dale could really hang out with Rick that summer. My grandfather had given him a task, and he expected it to be finished.

  “He always used to put Rick to work and he wanted to come out and play with us,” Dale says. “His dad would always have him doing something.”

  Dale helped my dad build the little bedroom he used throughout his teenage years—the one with the swinging saloon doors at the back of the basement rec room. And he used to get in trouble for drumming on top of the bar my grandfather had built out of an old bowling alley floor whenever the band used their basement to practise.

  “The biggest memory I have of your grandfather is him with his glass of rum or whatever he drank. And he’d have his shirt off,” Dale says. “And he had the big nose. And sweat would be dripping off his nose, and he’d be working—saying, ‘Don’t do that! You, get over here!’ He’d always be trying to boss us around, but not really, just because we didn’t know what we were doing.”

  “He was a curmudgeon,” I suggest.

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Dale says. “He was a really nice man.”

  “I remember that glass of rum too,” I tell him. “He liked to drink a bit.”

  “Oh yeah.” Dale agrees. “Yeah, for sure.”

  When he wasn’t stuck helping my grandfather repair things around the house—or digging out a hole big enough to fit a pool—Dad loved two things: music and cars. He wasn’t really into sports, even though so much of my time with him had been spent on the road to hockey games. For him, as a boy, the spark never caught. Instead, he saved up his money and bought guitars and cars. His first guitar was a Rickenbacker.

  “You know the black one that John Lennon plays for the Beatles?” Dale says. “It was the same as that, except it was sunburst…I don’t know how he got it, but that was his first guitar. It was an amazing guitar.”

  After graduating from the basics that Plunket mentioned, they moved on to cover bands like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Steppenwolf.

  “Back then, to learn you had to put the needle on the record and put it on slow speed,” Dale says. They’d rent an amp
from a music store downtown to make sure they could rock each song as loud as it was meant to be played.

  The band managed to cut a deal with the owner of a laundromat at the strip mall a few blocks away, where they’d play every weekend in an unfinished space beneath the storefront. At first they invited just a few friends—but more and more showed up until it became a regular party and the owner finally shut it down.

  And along with the music was Dad’s affinity for cars. His first was a powder-blue 1966 Volkswagen Beetle.

  “We used to boot around in his little bug,” Carol says. “And I shouldn’t tell you this, but one time we fit a bizarre amount of people—it was beyond belief. We must have fit nine or ten people. I don’t think there was an inch to spare in that car. It was ridiculous. Rick was driving.”

  From the Volkswagen, Dad upgraded to a green Toyota Land Cruiser. Then he traded that for a ’72 or ’73 Mach 1 Mustang, Dale says. It was also green. They’d spend hours together fixing cars on the driveway, listening to their favourite songs rocking through the AM radio.

  Dad and I almost never worked on cars together. I don’t really know why, but it probably had to do with the fact that we only ever had his pickup truck or a family SUV or van, none of which carried much intrigue. But I remember one summer when he was buying a new Honda Civic and I begged him to get a standard transmission so that I could learn how to drive one. We picked up the silver two-door at the dealership. Mom must have dropped us there, because we drove it off the lot together.

  Or rather, Dad made me drive it off the lot. Having never driven stick before, I stalled at least half a dozen times in the dealership parking lot as he tried to teach me how to release the clutch and hit the gas together. I felt like a fool. It must have taken us an hour to get home. I stalled again in the middle of a busy intersection, barely getting the engine back on before the traffic lights switched. We took an odd route that afternoon, one that brought us past the old laundromat where Dad would have played his Rickenbacker and up to the intersection of Cumbrian Court and Flowertown Road, where the bungalow he grew up in sat just off the corner.

  I remember it distinctly because of the horn that raged behind us for at least ten seconds while we sat motionless at the stop sign, clutch and gears grinding as I tried to make the car move. The other car eventually swerved abruptly and roared past us in a rage. I was flustered and angry. I just couldn’t get the hang of it and wanted to quit.

  “Don’t worry about them,” Dad said. “Just take your time. You’ll get it.”

  Another car drove around us. And another.

  Looking past me from the passenger seat, Dad would have been able to see the driveway where he’d worked on all those cars he cared for in decades past. He might have heard those old songs drifting through the open windows of the tiny blue Beetle he tried to cram a dozen people into. He might have, but I don’t know. He never told me.

  The car jumped forward as I finally found the balance, and we jolted on.

  That memory came back as Dale told me about the cars Dad loved and the music he played. I wondered why he’d never let me be a part of that. Was it because I didn’t seem to have any interest? Was it because I didn’t ask? Maybe he wanted to tell me all about it but thought I wouldn’t care.

  That same silver Honda still sat in the driveway at the house, next to the garbage bin where we were carting the basement junk away. The battery was dead. Rust inched across the wheel well. I hadn’t driven the car in years.

  13

  Matt leans against a stud, pondering the delicate intricacies of moving shit from point A to point B.

  We’ve drilled another hole in the floor about a foot in front of the stack, exposing the thick black pipe at a junction where it turns left, towards the other side of the house. It’s the main sewage line, Matt explains. Our objective is to tie our new drains into it.

  “It might get jammed up in one place,” Matt says, referring to the course of excrement. “So it has to actually be a perfect ratio, a perfect slope.”

  He kneels next to the hole where the toilet will eventually sit.

  “The toilet is going to flow down this way.” He motions to the left, towards the hole we’ve drilled out to view the sewage pipe.

  He explains that we’ll put in a “four-inch T,” which will connect both the tub and the vanity to the main pipe, following the trench we’re smashing into the floor. We’ll lay the drain pipes on a slight slope.

  “I have to look it up on the internet, I forget the exact rise,” he says. “But I think it’s a quarter inch over two feet or something. The optimal level for solids to flow through—not too fast and not too slow. If it’s too flat you’ll get clogs, but if it’s too sloped it can be a problem as well.”

  Tim, Jonathan, and I lean on the studs beside him, listening and nodding as though being bestowed with a great wisdom. I imagine this as some kind of Greek mathematical breakthrough—Pythagoras in his toga, squatting over the aqueducts and working out the consummate theory of how waste will flow through millennia to come.

  Matt moves over to the trench where the tub will sit. “By the time you get around here, this pipe will probably be about two inches or so below,” he explains.

  Now he turns to address his students.

  “So that’s the story. That’s the game plan,” he says. “Keep working. While Jonathan is opening up this hole where our T is going to be, we’ll start working on this line right here.” He points to an imaginary line from the trench across the floor to where the vanity will go.

  “Perfect.”

  “All right.”

  “Perfect.”

  We have a plan.

  But we become less and less meticulous as we go. Matt eyeballs a path for the line to tie into the vanity. Then he blasts out the sides of the trench with the jackhammer, running it along the path and breaking up the floor. The trench zigs and zags like the kind of straight line I drew back when I needed a tutor to make a connection between two points.

  I’m surprised to realized that the ground beneath the house is just crumbled bits of concrete stones. A light brown mud cakes the floor around us as groundwater creeps through the foundation. While I’m digging out the unearthed pieces with a shovel behind Matt, I hit something metallic. I kneel down, brush away the stones, and find a yellow can of Canada Dry. I pick it up gently, pinching it between my finger and thumb like an archeologist uncovering an artifact from a lost civilization.

  The can is crushed and faded. It’s narrow, unlike the stubby pop cans I know. A construction worker must have tossed it in the rubble while laying the foundation decades ago. It’s not exactly a treasure. It’s trash, actually. But still, I’m fascinated to find a piece of the past beneath us. It invades an illusion I hadn’t realized I held: that we were the first. That this house just always was. It reminds me of the stories Dad told about running through these fields as a boy, and the corn that grew in this place. It reminds me that our lives here are just a fraction of what was and will be.

  Our house was built by people who disappeared but left something behind. A house, a pop can—in whatever form, something that says they were here.

  Near the waste pipe, the dig goes deeper. We’re probably at a couple of feet down when more water seeps through the damp dirt around the exposed black tube. The recent spring thaw left it there. Jonathan slops the water and stones up and onto the basement floor.

  When Matt is done carving out his jagged trench and I’ve concluded my treasure hunt, Tim picks up the sledgehammer. He twists his stance into the sloppy mud puddle that’s engulfed the floor and, once again, hammers the path to pieces. He takes more than a dozen swings, each one smashing the concrete apart without any loss of speed or force.

  “Keep it straight!” Matt yells when Tim is three-quarters of the way across.

  “Almost there,” Jonathan says encouragingly.

 
Tim is determined. He’s breathing fast and hard—but he won’t slow down. A little more than a foot from the edge he finally lets up and lets out a long, red-faced sigh…And then he strikes again. He takes two more swings before Matt intervenes.

  “Stop right there! Stop right there!” he shouts, sweeping his foot across the space where the new trench will connect with the existing one. A foot-long crack has spread between the two canyons. “You’ll break up a big chunk of rock right here and that will mean more patching for us.”

  Tim puts the sledgehammer down and takes another deep breath.

  “Whoo!” I shout, oddly jacked up about what should be my brother- in-law’s strongman audition tape.

  “That was beautiful,” Matt says. “Look at how straight it is!”

  It’s a near perfect line of crushed concrete, obliterating all the earlier zigs and zags.

  Tim rests his hands on his hips. “All right, that’s enough for me.”

  * * *

  —

  After another lunch of pizza and beer, the traditional meal of Reno Titans, Matt is back teaching us Plumbing 101. He’s on his knees, looking down at the toilet hole.

  “We have ninety, forty-five, and twenty-two and half degrees—that’s all you have to work with,” he says. “So if I’m coming straight off this toilet, this degree is something like a twenty-two-degree fitting.”

  He makes the motion of a curved fitting in the open space with his hands.

  “But then we have to fit a T in here as well,” he adds. “So really what we can do is just go and buy a bunch of different fittings all at once and use the ones that work—and take back the rest. We’ll figure it out. It’s going to be drain day tomorrow.”

  Matt looks down into the toilet hole as he taps the stack beside him. “The thing about this is, I don’t think we’ll have to do a vent because it’s so close to this vent here. Because usually you have to come off with a vent and tie it back in here.” He looks up and down at the stack. “Yeah,” he says to himself. “Right on.”