Architects Are Here (39 page)

The windows were fogging up and the knobs to get the defogger on were confusing, so she wiped the windows with her sleeve. She remembered once, in the rain, when Arthur took her shopping. It was a day like this and she wiped the condensation off her passenger window. Dont do that, he said.

And she was shocked by his voice. It was a parental voice. That he cared about the Audi. He didnt want marks on the windows—the car’s air-controlled unit took care of condensation. She realized then that he did not love her.

The self, she thought, is more vicious than God.

She passed the junction where you turn off to get to the cabins on Grand Lake. She drove along the river, the yellow tractors to her left that were widening the highway through the old railbed. She pulled into the Mamateek Motor Inn that overlooked the Bay of Islands, and as she stood at the check-in counter waiting for her credit card to be approved, she turned her back to the nineteen-year-old clerk and stared out the seven-foot-tall windows and she might have been looking into the canal of her own birth, remembering nothing. The insane smoke of the mill, the march of white bungalows up to Crow Hill, the dynamited side of mountain making a fresh scar for the new highway that was being built night and day by those yellow tractors mounted with revolving high beam lights behind their own German wipers. The motel was marooned in a phalanx of city-edge growth, no longer on the main road out of town but in a detour and catering to the auto repair shops and furniture upholsterers sprung up to avoid municipal taxes, and on the hill beyond the golf course the three wide, squat schools, sitting like ancient Egyptian foundations uncovered and about to be restored in a nineteenth-century manner. She could not see Arthur Twombly’s house down in its wedge of green, but the hospital where he lay was smoking and, from its head, the shore road wound along the bay into Curling and Mount Moriah, wooded and undeveloped. She was going to see her son.

She phoned me and I was surprised at the sound of her voice. She was here. She was just a mile away. I was going to see her. We had a serious situation that was outside ourselves so we could be close.

How does he look, she said. Can you look at him.

Nell I love you, I said.

There was a pause and something digital that was shortening the pause on the phone. She said, Can I see you. There’s something I have to tell you.

Those were the same words she’d used to tell me about David.

I
DROVE UP THERE
and I was nervous. When I saw her I realized I was relieved she was here and yet I had to tell her about Anthony. In the flesh. I thought perhaps she’d send a person kitted out in sensory devices, while she stayed safe in another country experiencing Corner Brook through a computer lashed to the waist of an employee.

I held her and we kissed. And something soft came over her. She took a piece of paper from her pocket, paper you associate with reproducing machines. A black-and-white blur of a solar system. It reminded me of the time I’d first met her, when she took my picture on a dot matrix machine. But this looked like the solar system humanity will one day end up in, once we’ve discarded this one. It was an ultrasound.

I’m pregnant, she said.

ELEVEN

I
TOLD HER
about Anthony. The whole works. The idiocy that went on in the woods. It was a split second, I said. It felt like the end of living. That everything was dead. That I was in the land of the dead. It was atrocious. Nell was pretty shocked. She had come ready to make an introduction to Anthony. She was open to whatever that might entail. It had taken her eighteen years to realize a side of her existed that she had suppressed and now I was telling her the window was shut. Her hands were gripping the collar of her blue coat. Too tightly. Nell, I said. She was really gone somewhere, she was numb but her eyes were wild, her lovely dark eyebrows, and her shoulders looked like they were inflating. There was something demonic in her, and who can blame her.

She had to get out of the hotel. Could I drive her someplace. I was in my father’s car because they had impounded the Matador. There’s the funeral, I said. It’s actually going on right now.

She gave me a look, like, you asked for it. It was a bright warm day. My father said he’d come, I said. He’d known Anthony. He’d taught him in his last year teaching, before he retired. He liked Anthony. So we drove by the house and picked him up. But before he got in he tapped on Nell’s window. Hello, he said. She rolled it down. And he leaned in and put his arms around her. He knew how much I loved her. And he knew about Anthony.

Thank you, she said.

I’ll get in the back, he said.

I drove down Valley Road to take the shore road. It would be nice to have the water. Water’s soothing. My father kept it quiet, and I was impressed that he would let my world unfold the way it had to unfold. Nell looked tired and I found her sexy in that tiredness. She was pregnant. That was something to tell my father. I was impressed with hard work. I admired drive and it did not matter that much what the drive was trying to attain. But now the drive would be focused on having a child. Nell would be good at that and I wanted to be close to her. I had no idea, really, what Nell would be, but I was interested in seeing it happen to her. And when she saw me she was soft and put her arms around me. She wasnt going to shut me out. We had been practising a quiet faith together and that was still between us.

We passed the mill, something you dont see up close often. The thousands of cords of wood became individual logs. And then the quiet in the car became unnerving and my father helped out. My father is a quiet man, he thinks a lot and only says necessary things. He doesnt ever point out obvious things. And so it was a bit of a strain for him, but I appreciated it. He was telling us about a trip we all took when I was small. He was telling it to Nell. It was the time we drove across Canada. We were looking for another place to live. Gabe, he said, must have been about six. And we drove a little green Valiant with a camper trailer. The kids, Nell, they made these maps. Treasure maps. And when it rained they rolled down the window and crumpled up the maps and then held them outside to get a bit of rain on them. To weather them. They looked authentic.

Nell: Did you ever find a place you liked?

Nothing as good as here. Though I liked Victoria, he said.

That got us to the funeral home. The parking meters were shrouded in maroon funeral bags.

The procession had taken the slow road underneath Crow Hill. And I realized that it might not be a good thing, our being here. Or me especially. Perhaps, I said, we should just stay in the car. And watch. I was nervous about the Hurleys.

Well I’m going to pay my respects, my father said.

My father, unafraid, crossed the road. He dug his hands in his pockets, and waited beside some raspberry bushes. Then he saw someone he knew.

He strolled towards them. A Hurley. My father had an in with the Hurleys. They had arrived with the varnished coffin. Sins travel down the line but not up. The sins of the son are not bestowed upon the father. The graveyard looked wet, as though the sun couldnt do work in there. We stayed in the front seats and wiped the window of condensation. Then Nell took my hand. We were new adults, Nell said, when I had Anthony. Now we have another chance to be adults.

That’s what it means, I said, to be in your thirties.

We had the windows up and the doors locked and we were breathing in and out our own air.

I feel a lot of things, she said. And some of the things I feel are that I havent earned the right to feel the way I’m feeling. What was he like, she said.

Anthony. He was smart. He was handsome and game and he worked hard and he was generous.

I want to visit, Nell said, in a couple of days. Can we come back in a couple of days?

W
E DROPPED MY FATHER OFF
and then I drove Nell back to the Mamateek Motor Inn. She wept in the car, and then she got angry and then she calmed down. We had a soft drink in the windows that overlooked the city we had both, in different ways, grown up in. Her eyes dried and she would not look at me. She was depleted. She gave me the other side of herself, that side she only now was aware of, now that it was gone from her. I can’t see David, she said. I can’t believe it was an accident, I mean my various organs dont believe it.

I still loved her. My body hammered that message home. I did not want a complicated event to break us. That would be easy. I would never be in an uncomplicated relationship again. The truth is, if you dont marry and stay faithful to someone young, then the complications are bound to occur.

T
HE POLICE KEPT DAVID
for nineteen hours and then his mother was allowed to come pick him up. Randy Jacobs told me the car was to be impounded for at least a week. The gun too. The gun I would never get back. There were tests.

David: I’m not that safe anywhere on this island.

Gerard Hurley had connections. Even if Dave could get a flight, the airport was easy. If they didnt get him on the way to the airport they’d have a man on the Queensway run his taxi off the road and then scurry down the grade and put a bullet in his head. It would be that man from Moosonee in a new fox coat and the man from Moosonee would love that. The ferry was obvious. He would try a private boat, he said. A Russian trawler. He’d been talking to Randy Jacobs. We both knew that Randy played the sides. He was a police officer but he was friendly with the brown shadows of the law. He had recently been embarrassed by police surveillance. It was a camera in a mall washroom. They were trying to catch men performing sex acts. And on the tape in the trial Randy Jacobs, unaware of the sting operation, arrives to wash his hands. He looks around. He is alone. And he stands back from the mirrors and draws his gun. He shoots the mirror quietly. Then he puts his gun back in its holster. He postures himself and draws again. Laughter in the courtroom.

Randy asked if I could drive David down.

I dont have a car, I said.

Borrow your father’s car.

David was to sneak aboard and get off somewhere in the St Lawrence. He had US dollars for when they found him. To leave illegally was the safest way.

Who’s the contact on board.

Jason Linegar, Randy said.

And I recalled that name. Gwen Hurley had been married to him.

Gwen is the good in Hurleys, Randy said. You can trust Jason Linegar.

I didnt know any more who I should be helping or who to trust. Gwen, I would say, probably hated Dave’s guts now. I half hated him myself. But I drove him down that night. I used my father’s car. We rolled into a coffee shop for a doughnut and coffee and the cashier recognized us. Where’s the dog, the cashier said. She was reaching out with a nugget for the dog.

The dog, I said, stays with the other car.

We pulled into the Curling marina. Randy Jacobs in a green hunting jacket standing next to a waste disposal bin, a bin the Hurleys owned the contract on for dumping. Randy had a life jacket and a set of varnished oars in his hands. There’s a Russian trawler quietly moored in the bay.

We dragged the rowboat down to the wharf where the
Wayward Wind
was tied up. The last letter was rubbed off and there seemed something prophetic in the
Win
that was left. We settled into the dory. The seats were from a pew. This dory is a sacred place, Randy said. Like a wigwam. Any place you pray in, they can’t tear it down.

And then the three of us stopped what we were doing, and Randy said a little prayer. It was a private prayer that I can’t write here. But it was touching and David was pleased that we could all be sincere. It was to wish him safe passage.

We rowed out to the trawler. It was in port trading Bulgarian shoes for barrels of herring. Hauling aboard fresh supplies.

Jason Linegar is aboard that, David said.

Randy: No, but this one will get you to that one.

The shoes were Italian knock-offs and Randy Jacobs was part of the system that allowed that trade. That’s what I mean about brown shadows. It’s not that terrible a crime. He peeled us close to the side and David threw a looped rope over the portside railing. He had a knapsack with him: water and sandwiches. I’ll see you on the mainland, he said.

We rowed away and I held my eyes on David. Until he became a part of the bow. Even with the
Wayward Wind
and the prayer I had a bad feeling about his prospects. But David is affable and ruthless, he could rebound and survive. A large ship crossing the bay. There’s the
Corner Brook
, Randy said. Leaving with a load of pulp. That doesnt come up, Randy said, where it’s all wood.

Me:What do you mean it doesnt come up.

Randy: On the radar screen.

As we pulled into shore Randy began to cough. We didnt want to be noticed so I took over the oars to let Randy cover his cough. It’s bronchial, he said. It’s not the lungs, lungs are fine. It’s the tubes.

The coughing, I said. Is how you’ll go.

You never know, Randy said, what is going to carry you off.

TWELVE

T
HEY FOUND DAVID
on the second day. He was thirsty and had been caught in the wash facility by a Canadian fisheries observer.

Youre not crew, he said.

I stowed away.

Youre Canadian.

I’m American.

He was reported to the captain and the captain was furious.

David:You can just let me off in Quebec.

They werent going to Quebec. They would be at sea another six weeks.

All the meat was either wieners or liver.

The captain didnt lay eyes on him for a week. That was when he ran out of vodka, and then he wanted to see the stowaway. He wanted to blame his troubles on that one. The captain was crooked for ten days, and the crew put up with him being crooked. By then they’d weaned the captain over to moonshine and he had gotten used to it.

The fisheries observer was named Rolly Junger. We hate the captain now, Rolly said, but when we get off this boat I’ll cry to say goodbye to him.

He followed Rolly on his rounds. He tried to help him but there was not much an observer needed to do.