Architects Are Here (25 page)

You know we dont need to go the insurance route.

The man was already coming around to it.

Five hundred would do it, David said.

Man: And there’ll be no reporting.

Report what.

But answer me one thing. It wasnt entirely me.

He said this as if a greater truth had to be answered.

David: It was you.

He unbuttoned the one white button on the fox coat and reached back to his wallet. It was long and on a chain. Alligator leather. You dont often see money with no folds in it. All I have, he said, is eighty-five.

David:There’s a cash machine.

Isnt eighty-five good enough. Look at what you did to my Lincoln.

It’s five or nothing.

Where you guys from?

David told him Toronto.

Where exactly in Toronto.

David: We live on a barge near the Beaches. We’re homosexuals. It’s like a trailer park for gay barges.

He looked at me to see if this was true. I’m on my way, he said, to visit my family in Moosonee. I’m the successful son. I’ve got to look good and feel good and arrive good.

David: But youre not good.

I’m about as bad as you can get.

David: Have you killed anyone.

He pressed, with his thumbs, the capsules of leather in his wallet.

I’ve ordered killing.

He said it so succinctly that we believed him. A man who has organized murder. But maybe he was just matching the outlandishness of David’s lies.

David: You married?

Married, he said. He shook his head. Like, who’d have him. It’s just me and the car, he said, in this world.

Your Lincoln hardly felt it, Dave said. Can I sit in it?

The man let David sit in the driver’s seat. The workplace of a murderer. There were no keys. We waited for David to enjoy himself. And David remembered who we were.

I’d ask to sit in your car, the man said, but that dog looks set to tear my throat out.

We can either do the money, Dave said, or we can trade cars.

The man thought about that, and I began wondering how the Lincoln handled. I wasnt averse to the idea, I just wasnt sure what a Lincoln would fetch for resale in Newfoundland. The man rubbed his neck and seemed disappointed with himself.

I’d do it, he said, but it’s not technically my car.

It was then we understood this incident was stretching his mind. The implications. The car was a fixture in crime. The car had to maintain anonymity. But he was also thinking
Strangers on a Train
.

They walked over to the cash machine like men about to take a piss. I stroked down the dog and watched them talk. She licked me and I was moved. The man handed David the money from the crevice of the bank withdrawal and then the money from his long wallet. He took his receipt as if to remember what he’d done with the money. Perhaps he could use it on his taxes. Then he removed the fox coat. At one point they both laughed. He shoved the coat at David and David daintily draped it over his forearm. Then the man walked past me without seeing me. It was as if he’d forgotten he was dealing with two men and had driven the concern out of his mind. He was back to focusing on Moosonee and being the good son in the only thing he owned.

He had a three hundred daily withdrawal limit, David said. So we made it three eighty-five with the coat.

You look sad.

There was a woman in front of us, Dave said, did you see her? At the cash machine. I was staring at the crown of her dark hair. And I remember looking at Sok Hoon’s straight hair.

Amen to that, I thought. What are you planning with the coat.

Doggy dog.

We waved as the Lincoln smoothly turned and departed like some foreign yacht.

David gave the dog the coat. Then he took a windshield squeegee from a container of washer fluid and opened the trunk and leaned inside. He jammed the squeegee at the dent and it popped out. The dog lifted up from her coat and barked. Her first friendly woof. You could hardly notice a mark.

A good wax job, he said. It saved the paint. You know he plans on putting that Lincoln on the train.

We caught up to the Lincoln and drove a little bit together. David wagged the undented rear quarter at him until he got the joke. The dog up on the back seat now happy. We kept a corner of that cranberry Lincoln in the stock-car mirror, just to make sure he wouldnt crang us again and drag our unconscious bodies into the ditch to wait for the slug from a hired killer. A malicious crang. Then he peeled off north while we crossed the border to a line of orange construction signs powered by solar panels. A row of fluorescent cones with heavy tire-rubber bases. Signs that read
TRAVAUX
. Welcome to Quebec, under construction.

THREE

I
N THE DARK
, gunning for Montreal. I leaned my head against the passenger window and stared at a trapezoid of blue reflected light in the base of the window, like a pilot fish tracking the car.

This is where the Greyhound stops for sandwiches, David said, and pulled over. The customers were not the ones that you see on planes. I had forgotten that cheaper forms of travel attract poorer people. One woman with a chain of tickets—connections that would take her deep into northern Quebec. There were cases of emphysema, middle-aged men in worn clothes, a woman carrying a toaster, students and no children.

David:You looking for someone.

There’s always someone, I said, who stands in line with a pillow.

When we hit centre-ville, David said, I want to get some glasses. I’m squinting.

Dont you need a prescription.

I have a prescription. I’ve had it for four months in my wallet. It’s just they dont make glasses I like.

And he widened his eyes again, trying to stretch the cornea.

Okay we’ll get you glasses.

We veered into Montreal and took all those crazy ramped exits. There must be a billion dollars of concrete hovering in the air around Montreal. They remind me of the rings in the Olympic logo, and Montreal has that Olympic association. The word
Expo
too. When youre young you think a certain place has particular things, and when youre older you realize theyre all over the world.

We felt our way down to the centre of town, the way you approach stairs in the dark. We stopped into a Lenscrafters ten minutes before closing, but all their frames were too small. We asked for a boutique and there was one across the street. Apparently we were in the glasses district. Watching David point at frames in a cabinet lit with recessed light, the woman turning the sign in the window over, so it read open to us inside. I hadnt known Dave to be so fussy. They need to be bigger, he said. I have a big face. The woman in the boutique helped him. She had a big chest and short arms and it was a challenge for her not to knock anything over.

These ones, she said, the frames have not been kiln-baked, or varnished.

You say that disparagingly, David said.

They’ve been rolled in cedar flakes for six months, she said.

And we both imagined a girl in Poland rolling a little box for six months, as though she’s about to draw the winning lottery number painted on a pingpong ball.

Then he put on a silver pair. He stared at himself. Something happened to him. His shoulders stiffened and he backed away from the mirror. He almost careened into the kiosk of revolving frames. He pulled off the glasses and handed them to her. I dont ever want to see these again, he said.

He ordered the frames that had been rolled in cedar flakes. He gave her the prescription.

In the car I drove. David was laughing at himself now.

I put those silver ones on, he said, and a familiar feeling came over me, like a previous life. It was my father. Suddenly I looked just like my father.

I
T WAS AFTER NINE
and we drove to a pastry shop David knew. The women were wearing things like negligees over tops. What used to be below was now worn on top, and the same was happening with food. People were eating desserts and then they ordered rare beef on a bed of arugula. I called Lars Pony and David held his pebble and thought about Sok Hoon. He was just leaving a message, he said.

I said Lars sounded troubled.

David: Are we a hindrance? We can skip him.

It felt, I said, like I was talking to a wide-open sky.

There had been a movie shoot earlier in the day. They were still taking down props. While we ate near a pillar, a square of gold mirror unglued itself and fell on David’s head. I watched it slice down like a guillotine and bounce off his skull, then his forehead bloomed one streak of red. A gusher. What was that, he said.

A panel of mirror fell on your head, I said.

A grip came over and picked up the mirror. Nothing happened here, he said in French. And handed David a fresh bar towel.

You should sue, a waitress said, also in French.

David stanched the flow and a woman passed by. She said something like, I’ll get my boyfriend, he’s a doctor.

She brought back a handsome man from across the street. Youthful, lightboned and Panamanian. He tilted David’s head.

Oh you need stitches, he said, you need five.

A diagnosis in two seconds.

I’m glad, David said, there was a doctor.

He spoke quickly in Spanish to his girlfriend.

He’s not a doctor, she said. He’s a boxer.

The thing is, am I going to go bald.

Dave, youre bald.

I’m shaven, he said.

We took a vote, the woman, the boxer and me. A unanimous decision that David was bald and would continue to be bald.

I wasnt supposed to go bald, he said. This is news to me. I take after my mother’s father, he said, and he had a thick head of hair.

There was something about David’s mother’s father that David connected with. He did not like his father, so he skipped a generation and took up his mother’s father. And now this surprise uncoupling. Baldness was supposed to swing David to the idea of stitches. The vanity of a scar. But instead he said to the hovering waitress, We’ll settle for a couple of free coffees and we’re ready for our savoury.

B
UT HE WENT THROUGH
the bar towel and the bleeding would not stop. I drove him to a hospital and we waited in Emergency for two hours. The hospital made him think about his father, and so he phoned the hospital in Corner Brook. It was midnight in Corner Brook and he got an orderly who put him on to the nurse we knew, Maggie Pettipaw. His father was the same. There was no real need for David to come home. He could be this way for months. Then his pebble glowed and he had a message from his sister.

When’s the last time you heard from her.

He called her back. All he did was hold the pebble and it called her.

She lives in New Hampshire. She wants to talk about my father. She says Richard Text’s in town.

He would know where Nell was, I thought.

Me: Do we have a map?

We asked a nurse if there was a map and she came back with a revolving globe that must have come from a children’s ward. It was the kind with a light bulb in the middle that you could plug in. In fact, it was sort of like how I thought the world really worked, from an inner glow.

Bethlehem, David said. Sasha’s right here working in a lab. You cut through Vermont and cross the Connecticut River and youre in New Hampshire. We take the 91 and it’s no more than what, two hundred miles.

I didnt care either way. I knew Sasha as a youngster and so she’s remained a youngster.

What’s Richard doing there.

A high-level government visit, he said.

Have you met him.

You havent?

And I told him that I’d met him once, briefly, early one morning but hadnt known it was him.

You never met him in Corner Brook?

I squeezed my forehead and knew I must have seen him there, but all that came to mind were the stories Nell had told me. Can you tell the nurse, I said, that there’s a tightness in your chest.

Why would I say that.

It’ll shave an hour off the wait.

But he wouldnt. David didnt fool with his own health. That was his only truth, never to pretend an injury, for that injury will seek you out and smite you. He did not possess morals over swiping craftily an alternator from a salvage yard, but he would not bend the truth about his own health. It was connected to his God-hunch and praying. So while we waited, every twenty minutes or so, I darted out to check on the dog. I gave her a walk to see if she needed to empty herself. Then a Haitian doctor suggested a needle and Dave’s head was sewed up—the boxer was right, five stitches.

FOUR

I
T WAS MIDNIGHT
and Lars Pony was standing on his front step, waiting. His appearance made me wonder, made me slip into a Wyoming state. Lars did not look good, but he looked better than he had. His short black hair had gone grey. He was wearing brand-new white sneakers. He was looking like someone who was trying desperately for the part of Lars Pony, so much so that I left the dog in the car.

I’ve lost sixty-five pounds, he said, and shook hands with David Twombly. He remembered him from Corner Brook. What he didnt say was that we all gave his son, Lennox, a bit of a hard time. That’s a nice wound, he said to David. Lars had his own wound, a wrapped hand he’d hurt in preparing a hose from the garage.

He did not show us in, for no woman lived here. We stood on the porch.

He’d been married in Toronto. He and his wife had loved each other. I’ve met her, she’s attractive, a Newfoundlander. Lars is a tall man and his wife’s eyes came just to his shoulder. Lars told me once that they ate in silence once a month at the Royal York. When the music began Lars snapped his fingers and the band played his song. They danced on an empty dance floor all night. He had his work clothes and then, during these evenings, his dress clothes. My Wyoming. They are lovers, the waiters said to new diners. And the waiters felt sorry for their children. They love each other so much, they did not have time for their children. The waiters saw the kids at a Sunday brunch. This was fifteen years ago.

His wife, Nora, was gone now and so were his children. He had two children, one in university and the other working in the tar sands of Alberta. Lennox. They did not write. Nora had left him for a woman, and they were living in Mexico. They swam at night in the sea while the tall hotels prepared bedrooms. A fortune teller in the park, strings clamped to her table, to hold the cards down. The Germans, shirts off, one tries to fetch up a carp. She sent postcards to their son.