by Colin McAdam
“Ah, tanks, Jerry.”
She said thanks without the “h” sometimes.
“It’s doing something, isn’t it?” she asked.
“What’s that?”
“Driving the truck around, and all. It’s what ya might call doing something. I’m not wasting my time, is it?”
“Of course not.”
“Sometimes I feel totally useless, though, love, which is why I ask. I’m feelin a bit useless, Jerry, a bit . . . feelin confused and a bit like I want to cry, because, pardon me, Jerry, it feels a bit empty. Christ, it feels empty sometimes, Jerry, doesn’t it, love?”
“Just hold my hand there, Kath.”
“Yeah. I’m only saying, Jerry. You know, we don’t talk that much, and I’m only saying that I wonder whether it’s me or the world that isn’t worthwhile—I’m only trying to work that out. But not really, love, I’m just a bit down, is all, and also quite happy. That’s a nice hand, and I’m proud of yiz. I might just go for a drive.”
“It’s midnight.”
“Just a quick drive. Have a think. Stop thinking.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“Someone’s got to stay here.”
“Why?”
“Jerry.”
“Right.”
“Stay here, Jer. I won’t be long.”
IT TOOK ALMOST TWO years for Government to approve that development. And every phase after that was a struggle. The investors had their thumbs on me and on Edgar, I had my thumb on that Schutz character, and he had his thumb wherever he thought it would cause a reaction, but with all that it still took two years. I even paid Schutz openly, outright, above and beyond the discount I gave him on his house. There probably was a better way, a smarter political way to get things done, but I think that would have meant cocktail parties and dinners, which no free man should ever contemplate attending.
Besides. Free. Who mentioned freedom? There were Planners’ Meetings, Stakeholders’ Meetings, Developers’ Meetings, Union Meetings, Community Meetings, Jesus Meetings, Not Another Meetings, my friend, Meeting Meetings, surrounding me like a religion. I have no doubt that I cut my personality on a lot of the dull heads I met with, but I also lost my freedom. And somehow the more organized things got the more chaotic they felt—goals slipping further from our reach the more we met to discuss them.
I should admit that I liked meeting with the angel demons, even though they reminded me of how much money was at stake. They always gave me tips, but they didn’t deliver them as tips; they just had so many facts inside their suits that everything they did was a lesson or a glimpse of the future. They shared some secrets to succeeding which I am afraid I won’t tell you.
Edgar came over sometimes. I made a point of being home, Kathleen made the house look nice, put some colorful food on plates, bit of perfume on her wrists, and we’d have a little Party Meeting. Edgar and I would share stories about our crews, each of us pretending that his was the most hopeless, each hoping the other was telling the truth. The three of us were funny together, and we drank just until Sorrow and Drowsiness approached the front door. Edgar had good timing—always left at the right time.
I had good timing, too, mind you. Even though that approval took two years I had it all well planned. There was time for us to move, to try a new style of McGuinty. I intended to move into one of the big new houses I was going to build in the big new development. My stroke of genius was in the style of the house and in the timing (big, style, timing were what you call my marketing concepts for the development— timing because now is the time).
I had changed my ideas a bit, often actually while we waited for approval. The houses would be this style, then they would be that style. I would discuss that sort of thing with Edgar because it was important that we did different things.
I finally settled on a style one night after Edgar had left our place. It is true that they were fun Party Meetings we had, but Edgar took a lot of the fun away with him, and all we were left with when he left was a mess, that awful blue carpet, an unexpected fear in the face of Kathleen. Houses swell and breathe like bellies, don’t they, always shifting and fluid inside, goddamn it.
You’ve got your record collection organized, let’s say, in an alphabet of moods, but you play those records, you have your favorites, and soon enough they all collect on the shelf around the stereo, on the speakers, under Jerry’s feet, and the room is no longer familiar, your moods are scattered. It’s not just a matter of mess, it’s a matter of what’s going on in your belly: you have to control it because it affects everything else.
So the new style—I mentioned this earlier and you didn’t quite believe me—the new style would clean itself
A simple matter of smart ventilation and no sharp corners can take care of a lot of that dust, ladies. Nothing obvious—I didn’t make big goofy curvy corners, they were just curved enough that you only noticed standing close to them. Try doing that with plasterboard. And the ventilation was discreet, in floor and ceiling. Furthermore: marble floors. Grey marble floors in the kitchen and in the foyer. If you can notice dirt on those, you’re a nut.
Further yet: no open plan. I never cared how hip it seemed to see your buddies shaking drinks in the kitchen while you smoked in bed; it’s messy. Big rooms with high ceilings, that’s what I built, with walls like mountain borders.
The angel demons liked the ideas—one of them bought one.
Big.
Style.
Timing.
Clean.
Smart.
AND IT’S A CITY. It basically amounts to a city, that land we developed. No skyscrapers, sure, no churches just yet, but a school was part of it, yes, and all those shops, and all those houses, and more underground necessaries than you would ever dream necessary. And the churches did come, those geometrical ones with blond bricks and the devil’s artwork. The first school became a high school and two junior schools appeared. It still grows, without me, and one day it will be an important link in the world’s iron armor.
Call it a suburb, if you want, but it was still part of the city itself, the spreading roots of the buildings downtown, and I figure you can say a man built a city who laid roads, built houses, and had a hand in the magic that brought up the rest. I’d say he was man enough for you and I’d say that the ten years of my life at the heart of that expansion were the hardest, ugliest, most confusing string of laborious days a chump should ever face.
DRIVE WITH ME for a while and I’ll show you the area. It will be useful to see it from a hill nearby. Hop in the car here. It takes about half an hour. I’ll tell you about Tony Espolito on the way and then you can have a look at where I spent the days of confusion.
Buckle up. I’ll just get a bit of speed up here, a nice cruising speed. Nice smooth ride. A little faster, eh? What do you say? No one around. A little faster? Faster? No one behind, eh?
Wham!
Ha!
Sorry.
I should have warned you. Take it easy That’s the point, you see? No warning.
Where was I? I was just, it was just
Wham!
Sorry.
You’ve got an idea what the Espolito experience was like. Things were getting started, you see, getting properly under way like we were cruising just a second ago. Work had begun. There were armies of workers, everyone in his proper place. A few roads were down, and even in those early stages there were close to a hundred guys around. It was totally different from having just my own crews. Powerful. Professional. I even wore a tie when my hands weren’t busy
Jerry was at school, Kathleen seemed happy enough driving around, everything was saying “Smooth . . . nice.” But about six months into the thing, Wham!
“Boobleloodleoodleoodle oss man Jerry, oss man Jerry!”
Espolito turns up on-site drunker than he was Italian, and he’s up on some scaffolding throwing stuff down at me and at some guys who didn’t belong to me.
“I’ve seen it all, Jerry Werr
y, seen it, fag it. You’re gonna die, you’re gonna ssssuck on the end of it. What are they looking at? Who the fuck are they?” He had been complaining more and more loudly over the past couple of months about the other workers, all the guys he didn’t know who weren’t working for me. He seemed scared of them, but then he’d pick fights with them.
He was throwing bricks down at us.
“Had some whiskey, Jerry Berry, had some. I’m gonna piss it down on ya. Here you go, ossy. Big bossy. Ooh, it hurts when I pee, bossy wossy.”
And he’s throwing stuff while he’s trying to spray us, more bricks and things. He nailed a guy with a bag of dry mortar, which would have freakin Hurt. So this guy goes wild.
“Get down here, get down here!” he’s shouting, and Espolito’s like, “Get down here! Get up here! Get over here!” Barking like a blind old dog, and laughing, “Wooooooooooh.”
And a few of the guys down there with me go over to the scaffolding and start shaking it, which was a dangerous thing to do. They all had their hands . . . here, hold the wheel . . . their hands like this, white-knuckled fists squeezing the uprights and shaking the whole thing . . . thanks . . . and Tony’s up there all serious suddenly and even more confused. These guys wanted to kill him. We had all wanted to kill him for months. But I didn’t really want a man dying on me. And he was a great brickie.
So I shout, “Whoa, whoa! Fuckin whoa!” I was wearing a tie that day.
They stop, and then Espolito starts laughing at me again. But he slips, and the moron’s too drunk to think about hanging on with his hands.
If his wife hadn’t buckled him into his overalls that drunken morning he would have fallen straight to the ground. I don’t know whether that really would have killed him, but anyway there he is hanging from a bolt by the shoulder strap of his overalls and totally lost.
So I climb up the scaffolding carefully to try to help him. When I’m up there he’s just dangling and mumbling and there’s puke down the front of him.
I haul him up and try to keep him upright. I used to think he was just an annoying drunk, but at that point I thought he was a retard, you know, a man with a sad medical explanation behind his stupidity.
“I’m a prophet, fuck it, fag it, Jerry. I seen it. I’m telling ya, I seen it.”
The puking probably did him good, because he was a bit less hysterical.
“Oh, I seen it, though, Jerry. Seriously. I seen it all, and it’s not what they want to hear. Not what Jerry wants to hear down there. My head is hurting with it. Tell Jerry . . .”
“I’m here.”
“Tell . . .”
He was quiet for a while and he squirmed out of my arms and sat across from me. He was looking around and rubbing his face like something was irritating him. A hammer and a couple of other things were lying on the boards up there, and I pushed them toward him like toys—like I would do with Jerry. “Here, Tony,” I said. He picked up the hammer and hit one of the bars with it, like a reflex. He sobered for a minute. A well-swung hammer is a builder’s mother’s milk.
“I seen it, Jerry.” Coughs a bit of puke. “It hurts, Jerry. My head hurts so fuckin much. I taste it. Like this bar. Seriously, Jerry, I seen it in her eyes.”
He whacked on the bar with the hammer again once or twice.
“You’re gonna lose it, Jerry. I’m a prophet. You’re gonna lose it all.”
He was calm, and he was swinging the hammer idly, but he seemed to know what he was saying. When he said “it all,” he hit the bar twice, bing bing, and put the hammer down.
“Everything,” he said. “It hurts so much,” he said. “In here.” He poked at his head. “You’re gonna lose it all,” he said, picking up the hammer again, “and it hurts in fuckin here,” and he hits his head with the hammer.
It was a light swing, just a thoughtless wave of the hammer, and I just stared at him waiting for whatever was next. I stared at him, he stared at me, and it took me a minute—I don’t know, long enough for me to look around a bit, to let him know that I was waiting for him to do something—until the hammer dropped and I saw some blood and hair on it.
I should have got you to drive . . . maybe . . . it’s best just to keep going, yeah? I can’t . . .
He was staring at me like he was . . . to make a point: Your head is weak, Jerry, our heads are eggs, Jerry. I guess he was sitting far enough forward that his gut was keeping him upright. If you were there, you wouldn’t have thought he was dead either. You would have looked in his eyes and taken his point: Your head is weak, buddy.
I thought it was the only wisdom I could get from him—his action, you know, showing the truth. But I remember saying to the guys on the ground, “He was a prophet.” I know they laughed—about five of them laughed. But he was a prophet.
THIS IS IT. Get out here. I’ll show you. Come over here, there: you see from those pylons over there? And the water tower way over there? From there basically to the foot of this hill—not quite to the foot, about half a mile from where we are, but then all around there. From there . . . to there.
Yeah.
WHEN I THINK of him staring at me like that I feel like I have the flu.
“I feel like I have the flu,” I told Edgar and Kathleen one night.
“Have a drink,” Edgar said. “My grandparents called it ‘beaver fever,’” he said, “but I have no idea where they got the name from. You know, when you feel funny but all you need is a drink: beaver fever.”
“Bang on,” Kathleen said.
“It’s got nothing to do with beavers,” I said.
“I know,” says Edgar.
“He knows,” says Kathleen. “That was his point.”
“That was part of my point,” says Edgar.
“I know your point. I don’t need a drink. What I need . . . grab me a beer there, Kath. I need to stop thinking about Espolito dying.”
“Forget about it, Jer.”
“Yeah, forget about it, Jer. Listen to him. Yiz have to forget about it.”
“I feel like I have the flu.”
“Yiz’ll have to forget about it or you’ll make yerself sick.”
“She’s right, Jerry.”
“I am sick.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Jerry. If you’re worrying about the union, forget about it. The investors gave them insurance before the whole thing started. Don’t worry about that. And it wasn’t your fault.”
“I don’t care about the union. And I don’t care that it was my fault. I gave him the hammer, so it was my fault, but I don’t care about that. It’s the . . . it’s just the look of him. It’s hard to explain.”
“Well, it’s hard to like the look of him. I never liked the look of him,” Kathleen says. “I can’t imagine what he looked like with a hole in his head.”
“There wasn’t a hole.”
“Whatever.”
“It doesn’t matter, Jerry. It barely set us back. There could have been an investigation and all that slit.”
“Ah, look, have one of them sausage rolls I made—look, sliced all nice.”
“Yeah, have a nice sausage roll. You know, think about something else. Like what it must be like to have such a good cook for a wife.”
“We’re not actually married,” she says.
“Really?”
“Not actually,” I says. “You can’t imagine what that was like, though. Seriously. The hammer hitting him didn’t make a noise.”
“Fer fuck’s sake, Jerry, have a sausage roll.”
“It would have made a noise for him, I guess. He wouldn’t have had time to hear it.”
“Instant, was it?”
“That’s what they say. It’s what it looked like, I suppose, because he just turned off, but really what it felt like was the opposite—like he is still on, staring at me somewhere, that same stare. He said he was a prophet.”
“He was an eejit.”
“But how would you feel if a guy said he was a prophet, and then made himself look like he permanently h
ad his eye on you? Something like . . . like he was teaching you something forever but he’s not around to explain it.”
“Eh?”
“He’s staring at some piece of knowledge that you can never understand.”
“Eh?”
“Fuck it, Jerry. You know, it’s a lesson to us all about insurance. Yours is going up a bit, and I’m sorry for you, but there we are. That was probably what he was trying to teach you: ‘Good thing you have insurance’ or ‘This is gonna cost you,’ or something like that. So you two aren’t married?”
“Did you put Jerry to bed?” I ask.
“If I didn’t, who did?” she says.
“Anyway, Edgar,” I says, “I’m surprised your men aren’t all dead after all those houses you’ve made them build. Exhaustion, eh, my friend?”
“Ah, you know as well as I do that they’re tents, not houses. The only thing that’ll kill you from building my houses is the shame of it.”
“I think they’re nice houses,” she says.
“That’s nice of you, Kathleen. Jerry’s the one who builds nice houses.”
“I need a new brickie.”
“Have one of mine.”
“He was good,” I says. “I feel sick.”
“You look pale, Jerry.”
“He always looks pale because he’s never flippin home. He works too hard.”
“We all work too hard. You work too hard, Kathleen. Eh, Jerry?”
“Yeah.”
“Breakfast, lunch, dinner, she’s around, cooking, serving, whatnot. It’s fantastic. Did you hear, Jerry, the other day, Bill Cookson, you know, Cookie, the fatty, he says, ‘Shit, Kathleen, that’s the sweetest fuckin chicken I ate.’ Did you hear that? Fat guy like Cookie? That’s the highest praise you could get, Kathleen.”
“I might lie down,” I says. “Why don’t you stay, Edgar?”
I HAD A vasectomy once.
We weren’t having sex, Kathleen and I. I’m sorry to have to tell you that. We had sex a couple of times a month for a while, and then nothing.
“It’s Jerry,” she would say. “The other one. I can’t have another.”
Having to kiss her, but not too deep. Looking at her face, but not too deep. Our conversation had no depth.