Some Great Thing

by Colin McAdam

  But money boy, money.

  That old bulldozer idling in a thundercloud of diesel while Tony smokes a cigarette: that’s my money. That hour when Mario limps around useless because he dropped a rock “Cunt!” on his foot: it’s all my borrowed money.

  THERE WERE LONG breaks of nothing at first because those dump drivers had not yet learned to respect me. Dirt piled everywhere. Espolito kept digging the big holes, and the other Tony kept running around shoveling this and that. And Johnny and Mario.

  Johnny and Mario hated each other because they were exactly the same height. Johnny was tougher but Mario could swear more powerfully than any man I’ve met, and the battle between words and fists was never so muddy as when those two were together. Mario was always shouting at Johnny while Johnny was driving the dozer: “fuck . . . fuck . . . fackunt”; and Johnny would always have to shut down the dozer to hear.

  “You’re sucking on that cigarette like a fag tasting cunt. Why don’t you give me one and I’ll show ya how it’s done.”

  And down comes Johnny with fists like heads and he smiles and says, “How about I fuck your eye with my knuckles,” and he blows smoke directly in Mario’s right eye. So I’ve got to come over because I’m the boss, fully aware that these men could rape me, and I call a general Lunch! even though it’s ten o’clock.

  At lunch we all sit near but apart, and a round of stories begins. Stories on sites have always been the same collection of words—hard, woman, father, beer—used in combinations that continue to grow. They are perfectly timed to add up to forty-five minutes, and they are nicely designed—though nobody mentions it—to take our misery away. You can get a sad story sometimes that makes your heart feel tired from all the uphill crawling in the world, but you’ll somehow still feel better about going back to work once you hear it. Or you get the stories that start nowhere, finish in the same place, and offer no real fun or interest along the way; but they still feel necessary and go very finely with a roast-beef sandwich and a Coke.

  Tony Espolito often started things off. He had instinct, Tony, he sensed things. He sensed that Mario, a fellow Italian, was going to lose his face bone to Cooper, so he always jumped in with a story to change the mood. Espolito’s head, however, was a hollow, mysterious place.

  “Last Saturday I drank thirty-two Old Milwaukees and didn’t feel a thing. I rode the wife for three hours and cracked my head on the kitchen counter. It was a fuckin blast, and I’m never gonna buy a TV because, fuck it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Radio!” Antonioni shouts, smiling, and there’s silence for a while as he looks wise and reminiscent.

  “What radio?” Mario asks.

  “My father, he have radio.”

  “That’s great,” says Mario, “but we’re talking about television right now, and I don’t know why. I’ll tell you one thing. When big Jerry over here pays me a few times, I’m buying a TV.”

  “I drank thirty-three Old Milwaukees on Sunday. I like the way it feels.”

  “I know a guy in Kingston Pen drank sixty shots of Listerine.” Johnny’s stories were always about prison, and were short.

  “I remember,” says Mario, “when I was eighteen, fuckin nineteen, we followed this fuckin friend of ours around, who said, ‘Boys, my friends, I’m gonna show yooz lady cunts what beer was meant to do to a man, and if yooz want to put some money down, I say I can drink one hundred Labatt’s 50s before the clock strikes twelve.’ And this was fuckin three o’clock or something, and we all put our money down and followed this friend, fuckin Giuseppe, around the neighborhood, carrying cases—we all had beers with us, cases—and we walked and sat for hours, fuckin clink! twenty-one! clink! twenty-two! And we was all getting drunk ourselves watching Giuseppe, you know, clink! pssht, and he’d eat the bottle. Couple of the gals in the neighborhood, you know. And beer comes in cases of twenty-four because that’s all a man needs, right?”

  “Just about,” Espolito says.

  “So fuckin Giuseppe’s up at forty-five beers, and it’s dark outside and we’re just watching him, because, he was a fuckin brag, Giuseppe, always loud and shit, but we was watching him because he was just doing everything, you know being every person a fuckin man can be, quiet, mad, laughing, crying like a little hoor, and running around being funny after the girls. And at forty-five he just goes all quiet and he gets that look and boom, passes out. I threw up something brown that night.”

  “My father,” Antonioni shouts again, “have radio, because my mother, she no want my father on top of her, and my father, he . . . does not drink.”

  He clapped his hands once, and I’ve never seen such confusion among men.

  JIGAJIGAJIGA!

  “Hey fellas. How are yiz? Tony? Ya look filthy. Doesn’t your mother bathe you? Hey, Mario.”

  “Hey gorgeous. Whatcha wearin under your jeans?”

  “A cleaver. What can I get you Mario?”

  “Get me one of them egg sandwiches, baby.”

  “Tony, you made up yer mind yet?”

  “I have egg.”

  “Two egg sandwiches. What about the rest of yiz?”

  “Same.”

  “Same.”

  “Four eggs. I’ll give yiz a discount.”

  “Don’t forget your man.”

  “I know what he wants.”

  “I bet you do, baby. Two melons and a mouthful of prosciutto.”

  “Yer a riot, Mario. Feck off and play in the dirt while I make these sandwiches. How’s it going today, Jer?”

  “It’s going good. We’re clearing it. I’m going to get Johnny to do the blasting by the end of the week.”

  “Ah, good. He’ll like that, won’t you, Johnny?”

  “My sandwich ready?”

  “How’s it going with you?” I say.

  “Good.”

  “Good.”

  “Fecking awful cause of all the filthy mouths, but I’m fillin them. I’ve got to get over to the other new site there, that Edgar Davies one.”

  “How’s that lookin?”

  “About the same, same as this.”

  “The dumps keep going to him first. I’ve got to do something about that.”

  “Here’s the sandwiches. I’ve put an extra slice of tomato in there for ya, Jer.”

  “You’re not going already, are you?”

  “I’ve got to. I can’t live off you guys alone.”

  “That’s because my sandwich is always free. Here, I must owe you ten bucks. Here.”

  Kathleen started sneezing. She always sneezed after making a round of sandwiches. Lots of small ones, like she was counting the tasks she had finished in a cute little language that I didn’t speak. The men always said “Bless you” in tones of love and religion.

  “Well, I might take a break since yer paying, Jer. Don’t mind if I do in that case. I’ll just sit up here.”

  She never came out of her truck, and I wouldn’t go in while the men were around. And there were rarely any stories when she stayed. I leaned against the counter, just there, by the serving window. And the men stood around, silent, cool, looking at different parts of the world. There was always a good ten minutes of nothing, just the sound of mouths and eggs and whatever washed it down. There’s an invisible thread connecting that sort of group. I’ve noticed it around country people too. Faces look like they’re lost in a private dream, but everyone’s actually observing the same thing. A noon wind crawls across the group like steam, say, and right when it reaches the last of us, Mario will say, “Hot as ass,” and we all silently nod.

  We would all notice when Kathleen moved. If she shifted in her chair, Espolito would shift a bit, kick a rock or something, maybe Mario would cough. We were watching her even if we weren’t.

  Crusts were usually swallowed at around the same time and that was when someone might spit, tell a joke, make an order, or, in the case of Kathleen, sing some new thought that made you want to hold her up naked and smile.<
br />
  “You’ve got parsley on your lip there, Jer, looks a bit like Ireland.”

  JigaJigaJiga!

  “Gotta go, boys. Gotta go.”

  4

  BY THE END of that night the tastes on his tongue were of onions, cognac, and the butter of Renée. O the things he and Renée got up to, as the world looked through his tiny window.

  I should tell you about his job.

  THE JOB, you see, the job was created for the man: slippery, hard to know, potent.

  Simon and his colleagues shaped a vast area of this city.

  The National Capital Division had existed in one form or another since 1899—always with the mandate of planning Canada’s capital. In the early days, the issues were infrastructure, determining how much land the Government would need for itself. The city had changed from a lumber town to the seat of government, and the challenge for the Division was to accommodate the multiplying bureaucrats, scientists, military moustaches and the thousands of burghers they spawned. It was a glorious race of demi-giants in need of an appropriate landscape.

  The city was prosperous, and poor, in a way many of us have forgotten. Income ranged from nothing to solid. Words like “railway” and “milk” still had a significance that has partially been lost. There was one hill of obvious wealth in Rockliffe, at the foot of which was obvious poverty, and from there the solid citizenry spread, west, east, south along the canal.

  The spread farther outward was as inevitable as that of a middle-aged belly, and the questions raised by both are the same: Can this be stopped? Should it be stopped? What does it say of our character?

  The Division removed the old railway lines from downtown, they created parks across the river, restored old buildings, transformed industrial sites into museums. They rehabilitated, reinvigorated, reinvented. Some of it thanks to Simon.

  Issues became increasingly theoretical. When Simon’s job was created, the words “culture,” “heritage,” “values,” and “future generations” were mumbled into coffee and were gradually growing louder. The Government knew what it needed for itself, more or less, and it now felt responsible for setting in the landscape an idea of what it was to be Canadian.

  Matters of placement and determining uses were the concern of Simon. It was up to him to decide where the eyes, ears, nose, and wrinkles would be placed on the municipal face: their shape, beauty, depth, where they would go or whether they would appear at all.

  And his primary tool was the memo, the oldest and noblest form of official advice, born with bureaucracy itself. It told Solon and Cleisthenes how to spill their democratic mess, Augustus whom to tax, where to build, how to grow a god. In Byzantium, in fulgent rooms, it sat on the lap of a meddling clerk. Ancient styli cut its waxen belly. That’s how Simon saw it anyway. He was the inky part of fate.

  Once a memo from Simon circulated through the Division, the Division would inevitably follow its advice. The idea behind the memo would metamorphose into an object on the landscape. The Division owned thousands of acres, had the right to expropriate anyone from any land that it wished to acquire; and it was autonomous. No Government department—Public Works, Land and Environment—had direct power over the Division. It was a unique situation, the absence of red tape, the power over so many Government branches, and, in Simon’s case, the power over so many colleagues.

  HIS NAME, you see, carried weight. Struthers. His father had been one of the Mandarins, the group of great men who created the public service. They had all been to Oxford (Balliol men), they had all been clever, incisive, shabbily genteel. Public Works, External Affairs, the Department of Finance— these had all been the creations of Simon’s father and his friends. And his father had gone farther, stepped bravely, openly, into the public arena as a member of Parliament and was the trusted friend to two prime ministers. A rare combination of vision and power. Ideas. Ideas had never been so golden.

  And Simon inherited the gold. He polished it. The children of these Mandarins all had a destiny to refine the work of their parents. They sailed on their fathers’ names, moved by their advice: Possess an orderly mind, my sons; use guff when you must, but never accept it; keep a strong head for drink—never mix; and before you die, apple of my eye, create something great for your country

  HE WAS JUST as clever as his father.

  A sentence, whether moral or grammatical, was his servant.

  BUT IT TOOK SIMON years to see, to understand fully just how powerful he was, how much he could accomplish. So much time was spent settling into that pale new office, determining what sort of man he should be to all his new peers. True power, he suspected, was not just in a name, but in one’s knowledge of one’s colleagues.

  LET’S SAY ONE spends a lifetime acknowledging the fact that people rightly distrust oneself. This face, this glib demeanor, ready wit, ease of expression—“I don’t like them any more than you do,” one might say. “It’s not me, I assure you. What you see is not the real Simon. I don’t know who he is.”

  Simon could become an exaggeration of what people imagined him to be. Or he could prove that he had substance. He could prove that he was not the creation of others’ perceptions— he was more than just a collection of predictable desires.

  BY THE TIME he was twelve he had built most of the models in Great Houses of England: Hatfield, Theobalds, several others. Not very quickly, but well. He had an obsession with gluing his fingers together: that unique combination of numbness and permanent touch. But when he finished the models as best as he could, he felt huge.

  If Simon’s father was a great man in the House, how great was Simon, building great houses so much smaller than he was?

  His father could build models from scratch. Cardboard, paper, matchsticks. “I will build a ship,” he would say and he would, indeed, build a ship. Simon needed a kit. “It’s a simple matter of imagination,” his father would say. “Imagine what you want, and build it.” It was his guiding principle throughout his life. “The public servant must find out what the public wants. If he cannot find out what the public wants, he must accurately imagine. And once an image is before him, the servant of the public must create it.” That was a pompous speech his father once made upon accepting some medal or other.

  Simon built his kits with brilliant precision.

  Eventually he realized that the city that contained his father’s house that contained those houses Simon built was small enough to sit neatly on his desk in the Thomson Building. All he had to do was unglue himself.

  5

  I’VE GOT MYSELF a beer going, and when I swallow there’s a pain high up in that canal that memories run along, you know, between the spine and the heart. Fear on one bank, yearning on the other.

  I MADE A PACT with Edgar Davies, a while before he fucked Kathleen, that we would pool our resources. There was too much land for one of us, we both agreed, at least at that stage of things, and we could both be powerful if we worked together.

  Edgar Davies was a little older than I was and from pretty much the same background. He did a year of college but I’m a foot taller than he is. I can’t say whether his motivation to build was similar to mine, but I know that his goal was different. It is Edgar Davies you can thank for walls that show their studs like pimples, for houses that look too new when they’re built, for the aging sugared porridge of choiceless making-do that all the world has drowned in. And I’m afraid that’s why we got along. We wanted different things.

  “Jerry,” he said. “You make the strong houses, I’ll make the shit. If people can’t afford yours, they’ll choose mine. We can split the market.”

  He dressed his houses up with language, “half-timber, Tudor living,” “a taste of the dream of Italy,” and sold them in divisions of two hundred. All of them exactly eleven hundred square feet, and identical inside except for the way they collapsed. He had a new alternative to wood every two years, materials like polypropylethylfiloplasticene, which an all-knowing God could never have imagined. It was a shame,
because he’s a good craftsman, Edgar. But at least he kept things cheap. They were houses for people like I would have been, one notch above poor, and he only charged one notch, maybe a notch and a quarter, above free. He made his money from volume.

  Anyway, we made that pact very early on, on account of the dump trucks. They just weren’t coming to me, so I rode around with Kathleen in her truck to talk to Edgar at his site one day. He was maybe a hole or two ahead of me, which I liked to see. (Close competition is what helps a city spread—without men showing off, a city will never unfasten its girdle.)

  Edgar told me the dumps hadn’t been coming to him either, until he started slipping the drivers an extra twenty bucks a week. Christmas fund, donation to the union, that sort of thing. We agreed that the thing to do was to tell the drivers that for the same amount again from me, for the Children’s Hospital or the wife’s family back home, they might do a couple of extra shifts some nights and make sure they concentrated on me for a while.

  Soon the dumps came steady, blowing flowers of diesel at the sky, loading up and driving off to share with an unseen pit that “this dirt belonged to McGuinty.”

  And Johnny got ready for blasting.

  “OHHH, JER, ya do me good like that there, Jer, like that there, Jer, like slow . . . there, Jer.”

  EVER CRACKED your head on your spine by jumping on your heels? Try it while I tell you about explosives.

  Let’s not make too much of this first job, right, no: I had only two boulders and one small gradient to destroy on that site. But like any other builder I hated the thought of blasting.

  Professional blasting is the construction world’s dentistry: pain, expense, and unexpected smells, all for the sake of someone else’s idea of what looks good. I hate the fuckin dentist. The solution is to smile rarely and to handle your own explosives.

  You drill the rock in a grid, holes about six inches apart across the area, and you drill down as far as you think an expert would. I did the drilling because grids didn’t exist in the minds of my men. Once I was finished Johnny took over with hungry dribble in the corners of his mouth, running wire down the holes with blasting caps at the buried end.