by Dan Robson
Tim, Jonathan, and I stand around him, holding beers. It sounds like Matt is up to something, but I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.
I sigh. “Good work,” I say, nodding.
Matt takes a long, slow sip of his beer.
Then he walks over to the wall between the rafters where the tub will sit. “We need to find a place to pop a fan vent through,” he tells us. “We’ll have to go out to the side of the house with the rotary hammer. And we’ll just pop a hole through here.”
This surprises me. Does he mean we’re going to drill an actual hole through the house? “What?” I ask, with clear concern.
“We’ll want to make sure nothing is in the way,” Matt continues, ignoring the question.
Nothing as in what, exactly, I wonder. Just the brick walls that hold up our house?
“Let’s go outside,” Matt says. “We’ll check it out.”
* * *
—
Minutes later, I’m standing next to the house holding a rotary hammer. It’s a sunny afternoon. I’m wearing a blue T-shirt and a dust mask pulled up on my forehead. I’ve also got on Dad’s tool belt, Dad’s boots and socks, a pair of his old jogging pants, and his black work gloves. The rotary hammer is huge and green. It looks like a normal drill, but is at least five times the size. It’s a drill for giants.
We set up to the right of the bay window that looks out from the dining room, next to our air-conditioning system. Our neighbour, Pete, watches over the fence. Matt has marked a spot on the brick wall that we intend to bore a hole into, breaking through to the basement. He offers me the honours. But I’m uneasy about driving this enormous drill bit through the side of our house. It seems a little too trial-and-error to be drilling through a perfectly fine brick wall.
I move to hand Matt the drill, but he objects.
“No, no—you’ve got to put a hole in this house,” he says.
I know he’s right.
“How do you put a hole in a house?” I ask. I’m holding the drill at my hip with two hands, like a flame thrower in an action movie.
Matt puts his hand on mine, on top of the trigger. “You just aim and…” He squeezes and the rotary hammer screams to life.
“Start going straight!” Matt yells.
I’m not sure I’ve even started in the right spot. “Did you mark it off?” I shout.
He doesn’t hear me. But it feels like this is an important detail. I’m holding the bit about an inch from the wall.
“Did you mark it off!?” I shout again. Then I let go of the trigger and step back as the bit slows.
“It’s here,” Matt says, pointing to an unmarked spot on a brick that I’m certain is random.
I crouch down with the hammer drill in place. We’re beyond questions now.
I push the bit softly against the brick, where it rips to life and bounces right back, just as the jackhammer had.
Tim and Jonathan stand by the fence next to where Pete is peering over, each of them laughing at the spectacle.
I try to focus.
“Here,” Matt says. He grabs the hammer bit, pushes it against the wall, and backs away.
“And then I start pushing?” I ask.
“It’ll do the work,” Matt assures me. “You don’t have to put a lot of pressure on it.”
I shake my head and pull the trigger again.
The bit whirls for a moment, and then it gets high-pitched—almost a metallic squeal. The drill jumps back, drops, and then hits the wall again lower down. And I jump back and stand up, retreating.
The crew laughs again—and I let out a laughing huff too. But I’m angry at this stupid wall. I crouch back down immediately, like a boxer bouncing back after taking a punch.
“More pressure than that?” I ask Matt—putting the blame on his directions.
I line up the drill bit again. “Right here?”
Matt adjusts it, raising it several inches. “Yeah, right there,” he says.
This time I’ll be ready, I tell myself. The bit sticks with a bit of pressure as I hold the drill steady, my right hand on the handle and my left at the base. It whines and grinds, but it doesn’t scream. As I press in gently it disappears into the light brown brick.
Then it stops. I push harder and it doesn’t move. I let go of the trigger and turn back to Matt. “Yeah, stopped going anywhere.”
“Do a bunch all around it,” Matt offers.
“A bunch all around it? How big is this hole?”
“We’re going to need about a four-inch hole.”
“Four inches?” That seems enormous.
“Maybe five,” Matt says.
When the drill roars back to life I press it just beneath the small hole I made. It jumps off the brick with the same metallic retort. I’d lost focus. I’d doubted, and now I was sinking. It takes me a few seconds to find my concentration again.
Now I move up and to the left of the hole, leaning into the pressure. The bit sinks through the brick once more, the holes now breaking in pieces together. So I keep the rhythm, starting another hole above the one I’ve just made.
Easy.
Matt taps me on the shoulder and I turn off the drill.
“All right, let’s start chipping it,” he says.
He holds what looks like a giant flat spatula in his hand. I put the drill on the ground and he hands it to me.
I press it against the hole, holding it like an actual utensil. “And I’m just supposed to chip away?” I ask.
As he picks up the drill, Matt looks over just as I start scraping the debris out of the hole.
“No,” he corrects—kindly, considering the laughter that’s rising near the fence. He pulls the long concrete bit out of the drill and then takes the spoon implement and twists it into place.
“Oh, we’re going to use that thing?” I say, trying to rush past my embarrassment. “I was going to say, ‘You want me to use my hand? Are you crazy?’ ”
Matt just nods.
“It looks like a giant cake mixer,” I add.
He doesn’t respond. He flips a switch on the side of the drill, moving it from “rotary hammer” mode to “strict hammer” mode.
“Right,” I say. “Strict hammer.”
I take the drill back, bend down, and press the new bit into the mess of the three holes I’ve made. “Okay, so what’s going to happen here?”
“I don’t know,” Matt says. He steps back. “We’ll find out. I’m really curious to see myself.”
I pull the trigger. It sounds like the quick burst of a motorcycle engine, then comes the previous whine and grind. I push in with my weight as the blade hammers back and forth, cutting into the brick and ripping apart the holes. It bores into a larger, narrow slit in the wall. I press the drill into it for a good twenty seconds, moving deeper and deeper. It’s all a bit much, so I let go of the trigger and the bit spins to a halt. I pull back to get the bit out, but it won’t move. I wiggle it a few times. No give. It’s stuck.
I give the drill another tug, then look at Matt, clearly frustrated. He takes it from me and angles it downward, above the hole I’ve made. Then he turns the drill on, it shakes and a good-sized piece of brick pops out.
“A nice four-inch hole,” he says.
It’s a perfectly symmetrical rectangle. How did he manage to do that with the mess I’d started?
Matt hands the drill to me and I jump back in, trying to do the exact same thing he had, tilting the bit down on an angle. But the bit jumps back and so do I.
“So, you want me to go above it?” I ask, as though I’m just double- checking and haven’t already screwed it up.
“Wherever. You can go above or below,” he says. “No problem.”
Up to me, then.
I jab at the hole with the drill in short spurts from all differe
nt directions. The drill sounds as though it’s sputtering. I’m making very little progress, it seems, with only small pieces of brick starting to fall out as I go.
Matt moves in and clears out the hole.
“More?” I ask.
“Yeah. Yeah…” he says, digging out the debris.
I peer into the hole.
“Where else am I going here?”
“That’s only about three-by-three or something,” he says, and tells me to drill into the brick beneath the hole to widen it out and make it bigger.
I have very little luck with this. I try to push down from above, but nothing moves. The solid brick repels every attempt. For about thirty seconds I move this way and that way, trying to find an angle—but the wall keeps rejecting me.
Eventually, though, a triangular crack breaks in the brick beside the hole, causing the corner to fall away.
“It’s wide enough,” Matt says. “Knock out the brick beneath it now.”
Jonathan has gone down to the basement to monitor our progress from inside. Through the window several feet away he shouts something about wood, but I have no idea what he’s talking about.
Matt translates. “This is plywood—and this is a moisture barrier,” he says, digging into the hole, pulling out the bits. “We still have to get through here. We can probably just do that with a wood bit and then finish it off with a Sawzall. So try not to take out the full brick,” he adds, as though I’m in control. “Maybe about halfway down.”
I give it another whirl. The drill is a touch steadier in my hand now. The final pieces of brick break away, exposing the wood that was hidden behind it. I step back confidently. Matt pulls out the final debris and measures the hole. It’s four inches high and four inches wide.
Perfect.
“Tomorrow we’ll just pop through all that wood there and then that’s it,” Matt says. “And that’ll be the vent for the bathroom.”
“Beauty,” I say.
And we call it a day. The sun sinks in the backyard. My old faded Fisher-Price basketball net sits on the concrete base of a shed we never got around to building. The anchor bolts for the diving board jut out from the patio stones. The pool is unopened, a foot of dark winter water resting in the bottom of its black tarp cover. The bushes and trees are still bare, but the air is cool and it smells like spring.
* * *
—
The anniversary of my father’s death is creeping closer, and I don’t know what’s on the other side. But this grief-tinged fiction can’t go on forever. What am I really trying to accomplish? Why am I here? Why am I doing this, really?
Dad lived his life through blueprints, I think. He always had a plan for what he was building. And he always had a tool to fix any problem that arose within them. Now his plans need to carry on, even though he’s gone. I can’t shake that feeling. It’s what lies beneath everything. His tools need to be used, even though he can’t. Maybe none of it was ever really his. Tools build and shape our lives, but then outlive us. They are passed on. My grandfather gave his to my father. Now they belong to me. One day it will be my job to build a life for a child of my own. But I’m struggling to read the plans and understand the tools Dad left behind—and it feels as though there’s nobody left in this world to really show me.
So I keep searching for him.
14
Carol’s father died in the parking lot of the strip mall with the laundromat that Dad’s band used to play in.
Dale found him slumped over in his car. He hadn’t felt well that day and a friend had agreed to take him to the hospital. On the way, the friend stopped to grab cigarettes while Carol’s dad waited in the car. Dale was walking by and saw him hunched over in the front seat. He ran down the street to tell Carol that he thought her dad was drunk.
It was a heart attack. Carol was only fourteen at the time.
“I was dating Rick then,” she tells me. “And my dad actually said to me one time, ‘I really like this guy—he’s a good guy.’…I met him in the fall. And my dad died the following May.”
From that moment on, my father—who would have been only fifteen—became a constant in the Sheppard house. Carol’s mother was sick at the time. She’d caught polio when she was younger, and its complications eventually put her in a wheelchair. She ended up with epilepsy, too.
My father took care of everything around the house, doing all the repairs whenever they needed to be done. He made sure it stayed standing.
“It meant everything,” Carol says. “The only way I can really say it is that he was part of our family. Like he really was so close to everybody and so good to everybody. Rick didn’t have a mean bone in his body.”
Carol’s brother, Carson, had had serious kidney problems since he was a toddler and was often in the hospital. He was a year and a half older, the same age as my dad; they were close friends. Carson was a musician too, and they shared their love for that. And when Carson wasn’t well enough to drive, my dad would often chauffeur him around from place to place. He loved to help him out.
Carol and my father’s adolescent lives were intertwined with the mess of teenage love. They became inseparable.
One Christmas Eve, Dad threw Carol a surprise party in the rec room with the bowling alley bar because her birthday was on Christmas Day and she never got to celebrate. And for his birthday Carol bought him a puppy—a collie they named Sheena—because Dad had never had any pets growing up. My grandfather was away at the time. “Bob won’t like this,” my grandmother objected when Carol brought the puppy over. “He’s not going to like this.” But Sheena stayed with my grandparents for fifteen years, long after my father had moved away.
Carol and Dad took long road trips with my aunt Deb and her boyfriend, she tells me. One day they all decided to drive through the States to Georgia, where my father’s cousins lived. They drove straight through a blizzard—and Carol was certain they would die.
They’d watch Saturday Night Live every weekend. And on Sunday mornings they’d drive to the Country Style café downtown and have a coffee and doughnut, like an old retired couple.
Sometimes the group of friends they hung out with did psychedelic drugs on the weekends—and mostly at the Sheppard house, which had become the go-to party spot after their father died. Carson and his friends were heavily into it too. My father was always there but never partook, Carol says, because he didn’t want to disappoint his parents. I wonder if that’s true, or if it’s just something you tell the son of a dead man. It’s not hard to believe Dad didn’t take drugs—I couldn’t imagine him on psychedelics—but because of his parents? That seemed unlikely. I can only speculate, but I wondered if maybe it was the weight of the gap he was filling in a house that was spiralling around him. Someone had to be in control, making sure the place didn’t burn down. That seemed more likely. It wasn’t so much what his parents thought as that he was already thinking like a parent himself.
Dad had also become close with Carol’s younger sister, Cindy. She was very shy, but she trusted him. “Rick was kind of like a father to her, even though he was just a bit older,” Carol says. Several years later, when Cindy was twenty-one, he’d walk her down the aisle at her wedding, just a few months after she’d been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
At that time, my father—in his early twenties—was already rising as a solid construction worker. There was never any other expectation. No discussion of college or university. When high school was through, the assumption was that you’d move right into the working world. Right out of high school, Dad landed his first job on a site through my aunt’s boyfriend, Scott, who worked construction.
“It was basically, ‘Hey, here’s a job for you,’ ” Carol says. “And he kind of learned it as he went.”
And that was it. That connection is what defined the rest of his life. It was why I was drilling holes in the basement floor more than
three decades later.
He was good at it. He knew how to follow orders. He was meticulous about getting things right, which had to have been fuelled in part from years and years of my grandfather telling him he was doing things wrong. He was quickly promoted to finishing foreman. Dad’s path was set without a glance in a different direction.
Throughout my life, Dad would continually urge me to find my dreams and chase them. To hunt them down with every ounce of passion and dedication I could find within me, and to never give up. I’d never stopped to consider why.
“What did he want to be?” I ask Carol. “Did he ever tell you?”
“He liked the idea of learning how to fly. Like, to be a pilot.”
She bought him a few lessons as a gift, she says. “He was really interested in that.”
* * *
—
One night, years later, Carson seemed to have come down with a bad flu. A doctor in town told them he’d be fine, but it got worse over the next few days.
“Carol, I’m afraid to close my eyes,” she remembers him saying.
They knew it was much worse than the flu. My father picked up Carson, put him in the backseat of his car, and drove with Carol to a hospital in Toronto to see a kidney specialist. Every bump on the road left Carson in agony. When they got to the hospital they took him right into the emergency room. A doctor found that his blood urea nitrogen levels were lethally high. Carson went on dialysis right away.
Dad and Carol went home while Carson was treated. The next day the doctor called to say that everything was going well, but that Carson needed to stay for another day because he was complaining about having a headache.
The phone rang again at ten-thirty that night. Carson had died after suffering a brain aneurysm.