Architects Are Here

by Michael Winter

  She was getting off work at the hospital, and I went up to see her. I drove her down to the Keg and Kandle. She knew the reason why I wanted to see her. She knew her side of the bridge-building. For she had gone out with Gerard Hurley. They had almost been married.

  I’ve been breaking up with Gerard Hurley, Maggie said, for ten years.

  She finally left him about two years ago. He was in bed with another woman. She found his jeans on the floor and stripped out his belt and stared at the two of them in her bed. Then she whipped them both with Gerard’s belt. Then she left. Maggie Pettipaw has these flashes with her eyes. There’s a muscle in her lower eyelid that flexes, and a white patch around her eye, which makes her blue eyes appear to be lying in snow. As if snow has fallen in the hollows of her face. Gerard Hurley has bright blue eyes too, and I thought if they ever had a kid, what eyes he’d have.

  Maybe youre not over him, I said.

  That might be true, but what’s wrong with that? I still dont want to return to him.

  Would he have you.

  He refused my love with a various heart.

  That sounds what. Like a psalm.

  We didnt have chemistry.

  Sounds like you did. At the start.

  Maggie put her elbows on the table and sat her chin on one fist. That’s not what I mean, she said.

  Maybe compatibility.

  That’s it.

  When Maggie started working at the hospital Gerard asked her to get cancer pills. At first it was just a bloated number purchased at wholesale, but then he got aggressive and she had to do some accounting. Gerard split the pills into their two active ingredients and sold them to nineteen-year-olds in the pool hall on West Street. I’d been in that pool hall once with Gerard. He was drinking white russians. He was small but he was a dirty fighter. He did dirty things like punch you in the armpit and shove his fingers in your eyes.

  Gerard, she said, was driving that van.

  We had a drink and then went outside. It had started to rain.

  Maggie: Do you know what I like to do on a miserable day off?

  She had scuba equipment. She had equipment for me if I wanted. All we had to do is rent air.

  I’m supposed to meet David, I said.

  David can spot, she said.

  I took her home and we loaded up two buckets of gear and then drove over to David’s and picked him up. We took the shore road to Bottle Cove and parked on the beach and checked our regulators and spat in our masks. I’d known Maggie in high school. In junior high she was a tomboy. And then, after the Grade Ten summer, she turned beautiful. When she was thirty-five she’d been on a talk show. They flew her to New York to do this show. And it was a surprise show, with Gerard Hurley and his new girlfriend. Chairs were thrown.

  There was pity and humour in Maggie. Women are playful, she said, and men are all work. Even play is work.

  At the hospital she worked with a lot of men. To David: When your father came in, he was looking around. He explained the origins of the word chauvinism. He said, It’s the tendency to withhold things from the one you love, in case something better comes along. It’s not male or female.

  David: So my father was conscious when he first arrived.

  Oh he wouldnt stop talking.

  Did he say if Gerard Hurley was driving the van?

  He didnt know what hit him. Literally.

  She was telling me one thing and David another. In our wetsuits we held hands and walked backwards into the surf. Bucephalus walked in with us. The dog stood there up to her knees in the sea, tasting it, while we walked with our heels. I felt the water at the small of my back, then I slumped into the water and adjusted my buoyancy and found my regulator. I released myself to the sea. I sucked in the air, made the A-OK, and sank into soundlessness. There was a wild world down here, a turbot raced out of the murk and Maggie caught him by the tail then let him go. Goofy seaweed. It all happened in slow motion and slow motion makes things appear significant. The bad weather gone. I yawned to equalize the pressure and let the weight of water sink me and I remembered my Wyoming over Nell in the desert. That scuba diver who repaired the Bellagio fountain. Maggie Pettipaw propelled herself into a deeper zone, past the anchor ropes of dories.

  I followed her. The pantomime and the jungle. The water grew colder and darker, so I knew we were descending. I was trusting her. I yawned to equal the pressure in my ears. She turned to me and gave me a thumbs-up and I thumbed her back. I followed her legs and they kicked further down and now I was hers, she could kill me here if she wanted.

  Something dark and large and dormant. A ship. An old ship. The stump of a mast in vaseline. There wasnt much time to see it as a whole thing. We were down near it, touching it, though we werent supposed to touch it. A lobster backed itself up in a doorway like a scorpion. He looked to be ten pounds, but as I put a finger near him he reduced in size. Refracted light.

  Maggie Pettipaw slipped inside an open door. What the hell, I thought. And beat my way in.

  A hallway and the small rooms of a galley. A table full of sea urchins. The deep release of air, bubbles now hitting the roof and trailing along it. We stood in what had been the cooking area, but no one had cooked here in two hundred years. Then Maggie came up to me, very close to me, the clank of her tank against a wall. She put her hands on me and the corners of her mouth around her regulator, she was enjoying herself. Then she became practical and checked her air. We wandered through a school of wheeling white jellyfish. The light shone through their bodies and they stroked me as they passed, indifferent and going somewhere. And then a final check of her air and Maggie giving me the sign to ascend.

  DAVID WAS TALKING to someone, a woman. She had come down from a house in Bottle Cove. She’d recognized Maggie’s truck.

  You guys just sort of disappeared on us, she said.

  You remember Gwen, David said.

  I knew Gwen. And slowly I saw that David knew who she was too.

  Youre Gwen Hurley, I said. I hadnt seen either of them since that last New Year’s Eve, when we’d taken them up to Crow Hill in Zac’s car.

  I was waiting for David to tip over the table from all this bullshit. But instead he said, lugubriously, I committed to loving Sok Hoon before the love was there.

  They were resuming a conversation. While we were undersea they had been talking. There was allegiance to family and then there was allegiance to romantic love, and they were picking apart the latter. Maggie leaned against her open tailgate. Help me off with these, will you.

  And I worked on Maggie Pettipaw. I tugged at her neoprene leggings. My hands around her thigh, peeling.

  Gwen:That’s a powerful idea.

  The love came after, Dave said.

  But you’ll never know, Gwen said, if love would have come without the commitment.

  Gwen Hurley married out of it. She married a Nova Scotian cook, Jason Linegar, who is on a trawler now working out of Corner Brook. Gwen had us up to the house for coffee. The hard edge in Gwen, the storyteller, it’s her voice, low and kind.

  FOUR

  I DONT KNOW what I am most of the time, David said. I came here to do damage to the Hurleys, and I end up flirting with one.

  She’s the good in Hurleys, I said. She’s like Joe.

  We were in my parents’ basement. I used to tie flies down here, and make snowshoes and clean fish in the double sink of the laundry room. David was waiting for me to remember the combination to the gun cabinet. We’d decided to sight the Lee Enfield in.

  We bought a box of Remington cartridges at Canadian Tire, then David steered past the pulp mill to the shore road. Bucephalus with her face out the open window, her eyes pursed. Hardly the face of a dog that can savage another dog, I thought, and wondered if this dog had rabies.

  Perhaps, I said, we’ve brought rabies back to the island.

  Rabies is making a comeback, David said, like Latin.

  The gravel pit was the old Lundrigan’s limestone quarry. It had closed down f
or the past three years. The old train was parked here and we both instinctively looked up to find that face in the rock that our fathers had both shown us when we were small. There he was, the Man in the Mountain in the hills over the Humber River, near Shelbert Island where I used to fish in the mornings with Loyola Hurley. We parked the car by the fence and Bucephalus leapt from the window. She ran furiously down the road and we saw it, a dog or a fox in the woods. Bucephalus grabbed the animal and tossed it in the air.

  We ran after her and pinned her down and dragged her back to the car by the neck.

  What’ll we do with her.

  Why can’t she just be a patient hunting dog.

  I wouldnt want her straying.

  You afraid you might shoot her.

  A ricochet.

  Tie her on the bumper.

  So I tied her to the trailer hitch and jumped the fence and found a cardboard box, emptied it, then tore it into two flat halves for targets. We used to drink beer at the cement plant and steal gravel from the fence of Lundrigan’s. When they got a load it would spill out through the fence and, in our circles, what went through the fence was fair game. We’d load up the trailer with gravel and sand if we were making cement. Of course, it helped if you knew the truck driver off-loading stone. It helped just to reverse the tail-end a few feet more so the arc of the spill dragged itself through the fence. We knew men who bought dented cans from supermarkets and resold them. It helped if you befriended a stock boy who could make sure enough cans were damaged. The thing is, as soon as you account for waste, and make waste a commodity, more good things will become waste.

  Me:What’s the meaning of life, Dave?

  Kids.

  I dont have kids.

  But you have parents and you feel like a kid.

  I promised I’d always be a kid.

  Promised who.

  It was a promise I made to the kid in me.

  We marched off fifty yards and set up the targets.

  We each get three shots then we run.

  The shots would bring the police, as we were still within the city limits. David fired off three rounds in a standing position, then threw the rifle at my chest. I caught it. I was surprised though and had to wait to calm down. Risky fucker. I dropped to one knee. Then I shot and I knew I’d done better than David.

  It’s sighted, he said. Now let’s get the hell out of here.

  We left the targets and slung ourselves into the Matador. We were the old police making a getaway from the new police. We bombed back into town along the river highway, past coves and shoals I used to fish from, and only stopped on West Street when a body in a T-shirt jumped on the hood of the car and banged on the window and cried out, You cruel sick motherfuckers.

  What’s your problem sir.

  Mainland assholes.

  Hey he can read a licence plate.

  But it struck me. An image of Bucephalus materialized in my forehead.

  It’s the dog, I said.

  We’d forgotten the dog.

  The speed we’d gone. And from the way this man was into us. But maybe it would be all right. I jumped out, my hands in my hair hoping not to see what we had to see. We’d forgotten Bucephalus. There was the red rope and a cruel side of her.

  This.

  It was far beyond any hope and the shock of it paralyzed the next step. But I became cold in the head and knew what to do. Open the trunk. Get the keys and open the trunk. Now just lift her in.

  It’s about the worst thing I’ve ever done.

  We’re useless, Dave.

  We untied what was left of her. David had to turn her over so he could carry her without getting the rawness of her on him. I fished up the fox coat from the back seat. David held her. Then he put her in the trunk. Dave made a low groan that sounded like his organs were talking. The force of his emotion made me quiet, though I was in shock. We sat in the car a bit, then Dave drove around. I felt worthless and alive.

  We drove up to Crow Hill and got out and looked down at the city. We were idiots. Or I was an idiot when I was with David. He’s actually a bad guy, a disaster. I needed to love David less.

  We need to bury her, he said.

  We drove to my father’s workshop. I knew where the key was and how the door is deadbolted with a bar from the inside. I flicked on the lights and the pipes shone in the rafters like veins of copper, like you could mine it. Excellent plumbing. Everything my father made was excellent, and everything I did was mediocre or half-assed.

  David found a spade and a pick.

  We drove out of the city past St Judes. Then through the new real estate David had purchased for IKW, to build condos for wealthy tourists. We drove past this and into the poorer region of the basin. Deep into Hurley territory. We took her out here because we wanted a place that was undisturbed but also a place where we wouldnt get caught. A road down near the bridge before the powerhouse in Deer Lake. We followed that in to the end where there’s crown land and the watershed. We passed lengths of culvert being used to reroute water. We wrapped the dog in her fox coat, I could feel the shaved-down edges of bone. We dug a hole and buried her. We were both disgusted with ourselves, but relieved we could get away with such a horrendous act. We realized we werent going to mention it any more. It was like shipping your garbage to a foreign country.

  WE CARRIED OUR JACKETS to a bar in the corner of the mall to meet Gwen Hurley. The jackets were a shell for the rain and they reminded us that Bucephalus was with her coat in the ground and we could very easily be buried in these jackets too. We let Gwen sit by the window. She wanted to talk of love. She’d been with Jason Linegar for five years. When they married he said he wanted to live in a town, population fifty.

  I married him, she said, to get out of a town population fifty.

  Now he’s a cook on board a trawler. Population fifty.

  Corner Brook, she said, was too big for Jason.

  So it was more the type of life than the person.

  He was the luckiest man I ever met, she said. He should have got behind a counter and sold me a lottery ticket.

  Where’d you meet.

  Right in this bar. I didnt notice for a long time that he was short. I just loved the colour of his skin. I always think I’m taller than I am. I can’t go out with this guy because he’s not six foot two. Is that silly? Small of me?

  Gwen worked on building sites all through the Maritimes. She inspects their safety. Now moving into sites that blow up. She had all the gear in a truck with six wheels.

  We passed it outside, I said.

  You noticed it.

  Gwen Hurley was on a site in Stephenville last week. And a guy fell sixty feet just a few yards from her. Blood coming out of his ears and mouth. On his back.

  I held his hand, she said. Called 911. They have their own internal ambulance service on sites like this. Saw the guy wasnt breathing, put my fingers down his throat and up came clots of blood. Then did CPR on him. Still nothing. Ambulance hauled in and they used a hand pump, he came back. Next day a woman calls. It’s the guy’s wife. To tell me he’s dead.

  Gwen: I dont care about stereotypes. I’ll be a stereotype if you want, I dont give a fuck.

  David:Youre kind of lighthearted.

  Been through a hard year. When Jason left I thought about killing myself.

  She put her hand around David’s and repeated, I thought about killing myself.

  She knew by now what David was doing, that her brother Anthony was David’s half-brother. And that David was in town to talk to Gerard and Anthony about his own father. She laughed about the suicide thought, to make it into a joke. But David wanted to stand at the bar, his beer in a plastic cup. He removed himself from Gwen’s arm and stood with crates of recycling on the floor beside him. The Hurleys were into recycling now and waste management. Then David made for the door. I’ll be outside, he said. Behind him, as the door swung shut, one city bus, flashing by empty.

  Gwen:You probably think I’m a little odd.

>   Me: Is there some expression I’m giving?

  Gwen: I had long hair and a leather coat and people thought I was a freak. Jason didnt but people did. I roomed in a house with the toughest fucker in Halifax. I looked heavy metal but I was a punk rocker deep inside. I thought I could get any man.

  You destroyed your wealth, I said. You let your emotions rule.

  Gwen began talking as though she had never married, or that Jason Linegar was insignificant.

  She asked if we wanted to go to Maggie’s. She had to meet Maggie Pettipaw.

  We took her behemoth truck. David was leaning up against it. The self is under attack, he said. There is a self but there may not always be a self. Right now the self is a mongrel.

  We’re a pack of mongrels, Gwen said. She had heard about Bucephalus.

  The pressure, David said, is to make us all the same.

  Me: Perhaps we are at risk of having the self lost to sameness.

  Maggie’s place was a tight little two-storey in behind the hospital, but Maggie wasnt home. Gwen called Maggie. She’d be right over.

  My father is in there, David said. He pointed to the roof of the hospital where they were still hovering a heavy item a hundred feet in the air. He told Gwen the story of his father without mentioning names.

  All my family are black sheep, Gwen said. I’m the fucking white sheep.

  What about Joe.

  Living white sheep.

  Maggie arrived wearing a white leather coat she bought in England two years ago. It had one missing button that she carried in her pocket. She showed it to us.

  Gwen: I would never let two years go by before I sewed back on a button.

  David:You just have to, every couple of weeks, sew on your buttons.