The Carpenter

  — Emily is going to play piano for the service. I don’t care. I want to hear her. If I have a chance to see her, I’ll tell her I’m leaving town after New Year’s.

  — The time’s come, has it.

  — It has, said Pete.

  Lee just nodded and said: What are you doing here?

  — I was passing by … Look. I gave it a lot of thought. A lot of things are fucked up and … Well, they’re just fucked up. I’m sorry about what I said, about why would you come back here and all that. I’m not the big man, Lee. I’m not anything at all. Anyway, I thought I’d see maybe if you weren’t doing anything if you might want to come along when I go see Emily. Maybe you can keep me from making an ass of myself.

  Lee drew on his cigarette. He turned the spark plug in his fingers and worked it with the rag.

  — Go away, Peter. I don’t want to go to church.

  — Lee-

  — Listen, don’t come around here no more. You don’t have to be sorry for what you said because you were right. I am no good, and it was stupid of me to come back here. If I can get my shit together, I’m not going to stay much longer, either. For now, the best thing is if we just stay out of each other’s way. I don’t want anything to do with you. With any of you. Do you hear me?

  Pete stood for a moment. He felt cold right to his bones. Then, without thinking of anything he could say he turned to go. Lee had already bent back over the van’s engine.

  The encounter was still stinging him as he went into the church. The entryway was vacant. Through the doors into the sanctuary, he could hear “Good King Wenceslas” being played on the organ.

  He went through the doors and found himself at the back, behind all the rows of pews. The place was crowded. In the pews closest to the front, he could see the shoulders of suits and evening dresses, of coiffed hair, of perms, the well-to-do families. In the middle pews were the elderly, mostly blue-haired women, sitting upright and dignified. And in the pews at the back were the meagre and the odd. Some were families. Some were single mothers. There were children with cold sores and bad haircuts. There was a weird little drunk Pete had often glimpsed collecting empty bottles to take back for the deposit.

  He moved up a few rows and sat in an empty spot beside a lone man in a ski jacket who was gazing at the floor. At the front of the sanctuary, Pete could see the organ pit and the organist, and next to the organ on a riser was a baby grand shining brightly.

  It did not take long to spot her family. They were near the front. He could see the back of her parents’ heads and Stan Maitland’s thick white hair. And closest to the aisle, Emily herself, her dark hair, long and straight. The shoulders of her cardigan.

  The service commenced with a choral procession. The choirs wore red and white gowns and came down the aisles. Their voices rose: Through the cloven skies they come with peaceful wings unfurled …

  The choirs passed by at his elbow, adult child adult child. A fat man in his gown went past and behind him was Louise Casey. Pete could hear her soft soprano. She saw him seeing her, then she passed by. He watched her go. He saw Emily’s face turn to smile at her sister, but she did not turn enough to see Pete at the back.

  The minister came behind the choirs. He sang in a warbling baritone, not quite in tune. The choirs moved into their lofts and the minister took the pulpit. He spread his arms and said: Welcome all, on this holiest of nights. This was the night when the shepherds keeping watch over their flocks were visited by an angel who said to them, Do not be afraid. I bring you good news …

  The minister led them through some readings and prayers, calling on the Lord to remember the sick and the poor. Christmas is so joyous, he said, for so many. And so hard for so many others. The congregation sang some of the old carols: “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” and “The First Noel.”

  Pete stood and held a battered red hymnal at his waist. He sang perhaps every fifth word, hummed through the rest. Instead of a sermon, there was a re-enactment of the nativity. Children in the costumes of barnyard animals, in brown housecoats with shepherd’s crooks, in wire-frame angel’s wings. A young couple also in brown housecoats, with dun-coloured scarves over their heads, came down the aisle. They carried a sleeping baby. When they approached the altar, a child playing the part of the innkeeper turned them to the side. The child boldly waved his finger. The young couple went among the animal costumes and crouched down awkwardly. Joseph’s forehead was shining beneath the scarf. They were visited by the shepherds, pantomiming their wonder. They were visited by three children in purple bathrobes and plastic crowns, the Magi, bearing gift-wrapped boxes to lay before the baby. The baby woke and started to bawl. His mother smiled nervously.

  — Behold the King of Kings, said the minister.

  The couple took their crying baby out of the sanctuary and the costumed children went to rejoin their families in the pews. Pete thought about Galilee Tabernacle, what would be going on there. They had a Christmas Eve service as well, and usually also re-enacted the nativity. Pete himself had been in the re-enactment a few times when he was younger. One Christmas, when he was ten or eleven, he’d played the Angel of the Lord, speaking to the shepherds. He was vaguely amused by the memory. This time last year, he’d been sitting with his mother and grandmother and his little brothers while Barry led the worship. What had he been thinking about? Maybe he’d been stealing glances at Sheila Adams, as he was stealing glances at Emily now. Without question, he’d known himself to be just as much an outsider there as he did here.

  Next in the United Church service was a candlelight communion. The lights in the sanctuary were dimmed, and then Emily was going up to the front. She took a seat on the bench of the baby grand. She started to play slowly, “O Holy Night.” She moved slightly as she worked the keys, her shoulders and her head sliding forward and back, her feet moving on the pedals. The notes were bold and strong. As the music built there was movement up at the front. Church ushers moved into the aisles, passing out white candles. Following the ushers came the minister. He was carrying a lit candle and was using it to pass the flame along to the candles of the congregants closest to the aisle, who in turn would pass the flame to their neighbours. Small points of light fanned out through the choir loft and through the sanctuary. Behind the minister came two more ushers carrying the collection plate. All the while the piano melody climbed. The lead usher came to Pete and offered a slender unlit candle.

  — Peace be with you, said the usher.

  Instead of taking the candle, Pete stood up and looked once more to the front. Then he turned from the usher and went back down the aisle to the doors.

  He was about to go down to the street when someone said his name.

  Stan Maitland was sitting on a deacon’s bench against the entryway wall. Pete hadn’t noticed the old man leaving the sanctuary.

  — Mr. Maitland.

  — You’re not going to stay to the end of the service?

  — Well, I could ask you the same thing.

  Stan sat back against the wall and smiled. He said: We’re both a couple of truants. I slipped out five minutes ago.

  — It was warm in there, said Pete. A lot of people.

  — I started out Catholic, said Stan. I was an altar boy. If I think hard I believe I can still say the rosary in Latin and French both. But my wife, before she was my wife, when I first took a shine to her, this was her church. She taught Sunday School and she played piano for the choir. Thirty years she played. They named a room after her …

  — Emily talked about her a few times. Said she learned to play from her grandmother.

  — Yes, that’s true. Her grandma knew she had it right from the beginning.

  — You missed hearing her tonight.

  — It was too hot in there for an old bastard like me. If you want to know, Pete, a good many Christmases I used to work. A lot of Christmas Eves. I always thought it was a funny night to work, a funny kind of night for people to get up to this or that.

  Pe
te put his hand on the newel post at the top of the banister. He wanted the relief of the cold outside.

  — Well, Mr. Maitland-

  — One time on Christmas Eve we got a call to a car accident. This would of been 1960 or so. So I drove out there with Dick Shannon. This young fellow, he’d robbed a liquor store in another town. He’d made it all the way up here before he wrapped his car around a telephone pole.

  — Was he okay?

  — He shouldn’t of been, but he was. He was thrown out of the car and into the snow and that had to be what saved him. He was pretty drunk when we got out there. He was sitting on the snowbank on the other side of the road. Just sitting there, having himself a Christmas Eve snort of Scotch. Watching.

  — Watching what?

  — Well, it was snowing that night, same as it is tonight. And this boy had a trunk full of stolen liquor. When he crashed the car, the liquor caught on fire, and then the upholstery in the car caught on fire, and then just about the whole car itself. When me and Dick got out there, strange as it might seem to you, I thought that was one of the prettiest things I ever saw. All that fire in the middle of the dark and the snowfall.

  Pete looked down at his boots.

  — I should get back to work.

  — Careful driving.

  — See you around, Mr. Maitland.

  Lee was sitting at the bar in the Corner Pocket. He was on his third beer. A cigarette was perched on an ashtray before him.

  Events were moving quickly. He’d spent much of the past two days in the storeroom at the roadhouse, where he’d been brought in on certain aspects of the plan. Gilmore had not been specific, but he’d let on he’d done other bank-jobs before, in the Maritimes, mostly in Quebec. He’d come to believe that daytime stickups ran too much risk. An overnight job was how to go. Patience was his watchword. Lee had the sense that Gilmore had been laying low for a time. He also sensed that Gilmore wasn’t even the man’s real name, but what did that matter. Work was work.

  Gilmore was the overall planner. Maurice was to take care of the internal alarm system, and provide heavy lifting when it was needed. What heavy lifting consisted of was not explained to Lee, but they’d told him again they did not foresee any trouble. Maurice was spending all of the twenty-fourth doing surveillance on the intended location. Speedy was to put his welding skills to the vault. They would go through the wall. Speedy was proud of this. He’d said with an oxygen lance he could cut through anything and, perhaps unconsciously, he’d touched the scar on his face.

  And Lee. The eyes and ears. The six. The man for the odd jobs.

  Much of the security of the plan rested on monitoring a police scanner and on watching the street. They were to be three hours from start to finish. The police could be there in four minutes. If anything was coming, they were all to drop what they were doing and go their separate ways.

  — Quickly but not running, Gilmore had said, you get it? If it’s the street, you just go back down the alley and go home. If you’re in the van, you just get out and leave it where it’s at. Same thing. Split. We all go in different directions.

  — And?

  — And what? Wait. Keep quiet. Give it a few weeks. What nobody’s doing, Lee, is any time. Nobody’s going up.

  Gilmore said there was ten thousand dollars in it for Lee, maybe twelve, maybe more. They would hit the deposit boxes, but there would also be cash in the vault that stores had deposited, last minute, before Christmas. He reminded Lee that it was the season of giving.

  But the take would have to be moved first so it could be laundered before they divided it up. And here was the last piece. They weren’t going to drive the take anywhere. At seven-thirty on Christmas morning, a friend of Gilmore’s would land his Cessna Skywagon just outside, right down there on the ice. From there they would fly, all of them, with the take, to the lake country east of Maniwaki. And then by car to Montreal, where Gilmore knew some people. In Montreal they would get the take laundered, see what was happening on the news, and then split up. After that, Lee could take the first-class coach on the passenger train. Gilmore wanted to know if Lee had ever done that, taken first-class anywhere?

  Lee drank his beer and asked the barman for another. He had still not been told what bank it was going to be.

  Earlier that day, Lee had surprised himself by sleeping in, dreamlessly, waking late in the morning. An hour after he’d finished his breakfast there was a knock on his door. His visitor was the same young man he’d met before, the man whose wheelchair-bound mother had given them the canvas duffle bag.

  The man had a Datsun crew-cab in the parking lot. They got in and drove wordlessly to a garage in the industrial park on Douglas Avenue. Behind the garage was a fleet of various cars and trucks, mostly derelict. There was no one in the yard, but the back of the garage was open and Lee thought he spied some movement within.

  The man parked the Datsun out front and he and Lee walked around to the back, where the cars and trucks were.

  — This is your place? said Lee.

  — A friend of mine owns it.

  — So you have something for me? said Lee.

  — It’s over here.

  The man led Lee past a stripped car and a damaged pickup truck to a ‘74 Dodge B100 van. There was a crack in the windshield and one of the side-view mirrors was mended with duct tape. The van had been painted in a kind of matte grey that Lee associated with warships. Or institutions. The man opened the side door. One bench seat. A lot of space in the back.

  — Just like Gilmore wanted, said the man.

  Lee nodded. He lit a smoke and offered his pack. The man, watching him, took one and lit it. Then he opened the passenger door. The transmission was an automatic floor shifter. The upholstery was old blue vinyl.

  — See the radio?

  Set in the dash was the faceplate of an AM/FM radio.

  — It’s the scanner, said the man. We have the bands for the cops. I was sitting in here listening to the cocksuckers all morning.

  The man showed Lee how the scanner was wired to its own battery, hidden at the back of the glovebox, so that it could be used while the engine was off. The rest of the van was in as good shape as it needed to be, but Lee thought he might have a look under the hood anyway, later, when there was nothing much else to do but wait. The man gave him the key.

  Driving back to his apartment, Lee tried to determine how he felt, but he had no answer. The one thing he could be sure of was that there was nothing and no one he could invest his certainty in. He could only go forward, alone.

  Lee ordered another beer. It was nine-thirty at night. He and the barman made idle conversation. For some reason Lee was thinking about how there’d always been cockroaches in his cell in the pen. He’d never been able to get rid of them.

  Not much later Speedy came in through the back door.

  — Hey, friend, pour me a drink. It’s Christmas. I want to get right frigged up. I’m only kidding. I just came looking for Lee.

  Lee paid for the beers he’d had. He had less than twenty dollars left to his name. He followed Speedy outside. Even at this relatively early hour the street was quiet. They walked to the variety store parking lot.

  — There she is, said Speedy, looking at the van.

  — The brakes are touchy but it speeds up better than I thought. I never drove automatic before.

  — I’ll drive. I know where we’re going.

  — Not to the North Star?

  — No. We’re done there.

  They drove east on one of the side roads past the shopping mall. Speedy fiddled with the radio until Lee told him it had been replaced with the scanner.

  — How long? said Lee.

  — Fifteen minutes till we get there. Not long.

  — No, how long did you know?

  — How long did I know what?

  — Speedy, do you have any fucking sense? How long did you know what Gilmore was planning?

  — Oh. Well. Gilmore talked to me about it in August
or thereabouts. He knew about me from around. When he heard I used to be a welder, he came to talk to me about the opportunity.

  — August. How come it took so long?

  — They needed the time to be just right. They were going to do it earlier, maybe September. But then this one night, after Labour Day, I was out there-the place we’re going now, Arlene’s uncle’s old place-and some crazy little broad shows up and starts yelling at Gilmore. It was almost funny, Lee. She was mad as hell because I guess she’d found out about Arlene. Gilmore manages to talk this crazy broad down a bit, and he gets into her car with her, and off they go. Then I didn’t see the boys for a week or two.

  — Who was the girl?

  — She was just some broad from town. Kind of had problems, I guess, but you wouldn’t know that if you just saw her. She wasn’t deformed or nothing. She worked at …

  Lee saw Speedy was staring hard at the steering wheel.

  — Where did she work, Speedy?

  — Well, she was a cleaning gal at the bank. After hours. Gilmore would visit her at night sometimes.

  — And what, she’s not around no more?

  — No. She was real upset about Arlene and Gilmore. She killed herself. Problems, Lee. Nice girl, but. Anyway, Gilmore and Maurice cooled it for a bit after that. They almost quit the whole idea. But then they started talking about it again. Maurice wanted to do it just three of us but Gilmore thought we needed one more. Around then was when I ran into you at the lumberyard. Funny how those things work out.

  Lee watched the road through the dark before their headlights. During his first meeting with Lee, hadn’t Wade Larkin mentioned something about a girl who’d killed herself? It had been a meaningless question then, but thinking about it now made Lee feel unsettled and strange. The thin snowfall glittered where the headlight caught it.

  The grounds of the marina looked deserted when they arrived. Speedy had told Lee a little of the history, how the property belonged to Arlene’s uncle who’d been in a care home for many years. Arlene used to visit when she was a kid but hadn’t been here since. She’d known Gilmore in Montreal and they’d come out here in the spring, was all Speedy knew. He didn’t have any idea how Maurice and Gilmore had come together.