Architects Are Here (30 page)

We waited a day for Lennox Pony. We hadnt seen him since he was fourteen years old. And there he was, a big man. He didnt look anything like Lars. Except in his shoulders. His shoulders had the same hesitation, the deking move Lars had on the basketball court. In fact, shoulders can manipulate a lot of things. He had been an excellent goalie. He’d left Corner Brook and moved to Alberta and worked in the tar sands until a depression got him down. It was an illness and he was medicated so only his shoulders were alive. His eyes were dead. He’d lost his marriage. Something of the father had concentrated in the son, so it was an even stronger force, but also there was a more fierce tendency to live in Lennox. He wasnt going to kill himself. Everything in him was more powerful than the father, in both the positive and negative spectrum. He was like the nuclear era versus the dynamite era. Less total war.

I’m sorry for your loss, David said to him. And he meant it. I saw his eye and Lennox took him to be a sincere, thoughtful man. Which he was. But what residual feeling did Lennox have about being the young one, the black one, the second-last to be chosen, the one we all mauled a little, even me.

Lennox got off his chair and sat on the grass and lay back in the sun. He was flat in the grass, almost hidden. So I got up and did the same thing. It’s good to let the sky take up most of your vision. It cleaves you from the world and you can think of it as a separate thing from you, like youve got your back up against the wall of the earth and now youre going to walk away from it. I peered up to see what David was doing and he too had come down to the ground. Three men flaked out in the grass, about to stroll away from the world. The grass is a big thing. Usually men are with smaller things, that’s why we like women. Most men are uncomfortable with things larger than themselves, so it took some trust for us all to give in to the earth. Then Lennox spoke.

When I was a kid, he said, my dad bought an old diesel motor. It was the size of a Volkswagen. We built a shed for it out in the Lemon Yard. It had an exhaust pipe out the side. The motor was not used for anything, Lennox said. His father loved it for the sake of it working.

The ground in his back made his voice solid, like wood.

That was my first mechanical appreciation, he said. We’d go into the Lemon Yard, adjust the choke, turn the crank and have it sputter to life. It made power but it wasnt power harnessed to any use, just the marvel of power being made.

I tried to remember that motor, its little shed. I remember the Lemon Yard. There’s a drug store built on there now. We used to play ball in the Lemon Yard.

Dave: Remember that movie we were in?

Lennox:We were never in a movie. We never made it into the movie.

Dave:We were in the movie.

What were they talking about. I searched out the sky above for some sense of it. And then, of course, I remembered. We were really young. People from Hollywood had come to make a movie. They used a house on Valley Road and they were shooting exteriors all around the town. It was a film about two friends who work at the pulp mill. One day we were playing baseball in the Lemon Yard. And Lars Pony came out to us and said he heard on the radio they were looking for extras. They want a whole bunch of extras down at the mill.

The actor starring in it, Gordon Pinsent, was a Newfoundlander, but he’d been in American films. In one movie he played the president of the United States—he was a sort of JFK dealing with the cold war. Then in
The Thomas Crown Affair
he introduces Steve McQueen to Faye Dunaway.

We left our gloves and picked up our hockey sticks and took an orange hockey ball down Valley Road to see what was going on at the mill. They couldnt get enough kids for this scene. They said the hockey sticks were good, pretend youre playing street hockey. And you, what’s your name.

They were pointing at Zac Twombly.

You want a role in this movie?

Zac got a speaking part. He had to ask Gordon Pinsent if he’d seen his father in there. His line was, Hey Will. That was Gordon Pinsent’s character’s name. And we had to play behind the scenes, play some excellent street hockey, like we were also waiting for our fathers. It was pretty exciting. We’d never seen cameras and booms and the little caravan where you could get sandwiches and coca-cola. I must have drunk six cokes that afternoon. Then it was time for Zac’s scene. We were proud of Zac. We’d heard him practising his line over and over. Hey Will, he said. Hey Will. And then Gordon Pinsent was cued to walk through the mill gates and Zac had to break away from us and go up to him. Hey Gordon, he said.

At that time, being six, we thought there’d be a film shot in Corner Brook every summer. We didnt know that would be the last one ever. It sort of spoiled us, expecting the big wide world to come to us as soon as school was over.

A year later the movie came out. We all went down to the Millbrook Mall to see it. There’s a great scene where Gordon Pinsent spends his wedding night in the Holiday Inn on West Street. We were all waiting for the scene after that, when Gordon Pinsent’s best friend is killed in a pulp vat, and Zac has to go up to Gordon Pinsent at the mill gates and say Hey Will. How they had to shoot that scene a couple of times because Zac was so nervous. But the next scene was the funeral and then Will getting bitter and losing his humour. The scene with the kids never got in there. Lennox was right, none of us are in it.

We said so long to Lennox and drove back to Sok Hoon and said our farewells to Owen. This wasnt planned, just something Lennox had done made David want to see Owen one last time. A grieving son and then a young son. I looked at David as we drove towards the border. Then he slowed down and pulled over.

My glasses.

We had to find an off-ramp and wheel around and drive back while Dave called on his pebble. This turning around and the phone call made Bucephalus nervous. It was as if she thought we might leave her, and so I stroked her down to get her to lie flat. We found the store and pulled over and quickly got out as if we were a pair of plainclothes policemen from a seventies drama. We walked in together. David had stitches in his head and a white bandage around his hand. You look like if you dont get glasses soon, the lady said, youre going to do yourself in. It was nice to spend a few last moments in a Canadian store. They had the glasses there behind the glass counter in a silver case. They seemed thicker framed now and as Dave drove he kept pushing them up on his nose, touching the lenses and frames until there were fingerprints and smudges all over the edges of the glasses. It was a new method of punctuation as he talked and there was something in their hue that accentuated the stitches on his skull. Then I noticed the fresh pavement to the south and the new striping was like white stitches on a charcoal suit. We’d head south then yank her east and hit New Hampshire and meet Dave’s sister. Then it was Maine and carry on to Nova Scotia and push through to the ferry for Port aux Basques. That was the plan. When you have a plan you dont need to talk for an hour. Which Dave obeyed for about five minutes.

TEN

L
ET ME GET A WORD
in edgewise, I said. I was driving now.

David: Have I been talking?

You havent stopped.

When does that word ever get used.

What word.

Edgewise.

It doesnt.

It doesnt get a chance to get edgewise into any other sentence.

It was the slippers, he continued. Then it was that she was wearing everything the same. I mean, she wore the same things. A pink sweater and pale beige corduroys. Her hair was up and Sok Hoon was telling him a story of a woman on the phone and Sok Hoon made that gesture of her hand being the phone.

She bored you.

I was bored.

Well you bore yourself. No one else is responsible for your being bored.

He flipped down his sun visor. He was amazed at how well he could see his face.

David: Have you ever squeezed your nose.

Pause.

There’s a lot of oil in the nose. In every pore.

David scanned his nose. Then he looked at mine.

Youre not as bad, he said.

What are you talking about.

I’m going to start taking care of my nose. Allegra mentioned it to me. I was defensive but I can see what she meant.

Did Allegra mention it as a parting shot?

It doesnt matter, she said it.

Me: Men’s noses are different from women’s.

Yes but there’s quite a variety in men too.

Youre not going to start plucking hair from your nipples are you?

Do you think I should?

We drove to the border like this. The closer we got to the States, the more maple leaf flags we saw. Then federal buildings with the Canada logo. Such a weak typeface for a national identity.

David finally gave in to a desire, he turned the mirror and squeezed his nose. Nozzles of white cream lifted up their heads. He sat back, satisfied.

Now you have a red nose, I said.

What will the border guard think of that.

What he thought was, here are two eligible candidates for smuggling (apparently an unlicensed dog, a newly acquired car, one man with a raw nose, that’s what gets the console lit up).

The border guard was wearing a short-sleeved black shirt with stripes on the pocket and a blue crest for homeland security. There were gold pins on the flaps, and the rim of a tattoo from a previous life poked out of one sleeve. He asked if he could take a sample of the dust in David’s suitcase.

You mean I can say no?

You can say whatever the hell you want.

And then what.

Do you have identification.

We flipped out our driver’s licences. He saw my firearms possession and acquisition licence.

You got a gun with you.

No sir.

We have a Taser, David said.

A Taser, he said. You got it in the safe position and under lock and key.

We do, sir.

I need a citizenship card.

We looked at each other.

I lost mine, I said, when I was seventeen.

I dont think I ever became a Canadian, David said.

What are you.

American.

But you reside in Toronto.

I was born on a US army base.

Huzzah to the air force. And you?

I was three, I said, when we moved.

I dont care how old you were.

I was born in England, I said.

You sound like youre lying.

I dont remember England. I feel like I’m saying I’m from a country I have not experienced.

Well what’s to stop you, he said, from coming in here and living illegally.

It wasnt a question he wanted answered. He asked me to put my left finger on a glass keypad. It lit up red.

Right, he said.

I reached for my driver’s licence and was about to tramp the gas when he held on to the side of the window.

Your right finger is what I mean.

Then he hovered a webcam at us and took our pictures to be disseminated to every law enforcement jurisdiction in these here United States, including Hawaii, Alaska and Puerto Rico.

I’ll just take a look at that Taser now.

And David got out and showed him what I did not know had been in the car. He unlocked it and the guard weighed the black gun in his hands and was not at all nervous about David possessing it. David had the papers and the cleared security. Technically he still worked for IKW and that type of work allows a lot of freedom.

You and your dog, he said, are free to rock ’n’ roll. He did a little fishtail with the side of his hand.

Well then we’re out of here.

He raised one finger. He had all the time in the world to tell it, this one. He was lording it over us.

Folks if you do happen to go—he picked his teeth with the corner of my driver’s licence—I might have to arrest you.

Arrest.

And then I’d have to fill out the paperwork and apply for a search warrant. That could take one and a half business days.

He checked his watch and rubbed the face of my driver’s licence. The entire manipulation of my licence was aggravating me. Wednesday morning, he said, then stared at the long line of hot summer traffic humming behind us. It really didnt bother him, this lineup. He waited for us to ask. So I asked. How do we get around that, officer.

That took a lot out of me, saying officer.

If you oblige us this sample.

He pointed to a raised windowless bungalow set off from the end of the bridge. It looked like the kind of building that houses hydroelectric circuits.

The lab is down the road yonder.

You want us to urinate?

With your permission these powders in your luggage will be examined.

Or we can go but youre saying you will arrest us.

My guess is I’m going to arrest you.

And that means.

A night in this complex whereas of your own volition we’re talking forty minutes.

Dave clapped my hands. Let’s do the forty, he said.

Me: Are we allowed to fish in that river?

It’s a legal river, but as of now youre in the custody of US homeland security.

What if we promised to stay in eye contact.

I’m afraid I had to shoot the last man who lost eye contact.

But I’m saying we’ll stay in eye contact.

You can only control your own eye, Mr English. Youre not thinking of me. What if I lose you. Then I come after you through that brush and shoot you cold and drag you back here and have an autopsy then I have to live with that, my wife has to live with that, my three daughters, well two—one doesnt give a damn what I do.

What’s the matter with her?

Her parents are assholes.

You ever bring her out here, see what Dad does for a living?

You men dont look like you have daughters.

I just left my son in Montreal, David said.

You got a daughter?

A son, he’s a seven-year-old.

He leaned in the window and licked the inside of his lip. It was as if sons didnt equate to daughters.

One day, he said, I’m gonna see the bad one in a car like this heading Canada way. Dont ever have three kids. Two is good, three you can never get enough seats in a restaurant.