Ernie's Ark (9 page)

Then, in the fall, eight months in, everything changed. A scab died of heart failure while running the gauntlet in his red GMC pickup. The governor put the National Guard on alert. Three other AP mills—one in Alabama, two in Wisconsin—refused their contracts, the same one we’d rejected, and struck. A week after that, somebody—Tree Liston, is my personal guess—shot up a scab’s house on the west side, and that, too, made the nationals. And there was a rumor flying around that the CEO himself, Henry John McCoy, slipped into town one night in a silver-gray Mercedes that got a little treatment with a baseball bat. The guys who supposedly did it are known liars, but in any case the feeble wheels of justice suddenly hit overdrive: on a single afternoon in mid-October, court decisions came raining down left right and sideways. Mostly in AP’s favor.

On the following Thursday, the weekly rally thrummed with rumor, anticipation, a whiff of theater. The bleachers, which at this point had begun to show mournful blank spots, teemed anew. But I know Roy, I know how he swallows a lot when he’s scared, so I steeled myself for the news he had to deliver: we’d lost the suit; the scabs were legal; we’d all been permanently replaced.

The roar that went up sounded like the final buzzer of a packed-full state championship, with a rageful undercoat. We tore over to the gate for the final shift, singing and hollering and picking up anything we could find—bats, branches, nails, and rocks—and I confess that I felt electrified, thudding with a terrible pulsating current of fury, a solidarity the like of which I had not felt in eight
months, and it thrilled and scared me as I rounded the corner to the north gate with the bellowing throng.

Then I remembered my brother, feared for him, and the electricity seizing through me sparked and gave out, just like that, as I spotted the National Guard lined up like sentries at a warring border, which this most certainly was. They had tear gas and black boots and helmets and I secretly thanked God for them, I thanked God.

There was, miraculously, no violence that night, unless you want to measure violence in decibels. We sang and chanted, thrust out our chests, led with our bunched chins, then snaked through the streets until about two in the morning, until we began to scatter, reluctantly, piecemeal, spent and wary. We were still singing, some of us,
Solidarity forever, solidarity forever, the union makes us strong,
but our voices had flattened out, and something else, too, giving our ragged notes the superstitious urgency of whistling in a graveyard. Then there was nothing but a muffled, radiating silence, and a hung moon above our heads, and the smokestacks still emitting their quiet gray signals.

Paper was being made. Every man and woman in that unraveling crowd must have thought what I thought: It’s over.

Those of us who had held out till then went scrambling for something to tide us through the meanwhile, which is how I ended up as a part-time code-enforcement officer for the city of Abbott Falls. Nights I kept up with the picket; days I spent not inspecting electrical systems, as I’d hoped, but telling tired, edgy people they couldn’t build so much as a garden shed unless they paid the fee and allowed for a twenty-foot setback. In a city car I drove streets I’d known all my life, my dog Junie in the back,
which wasn’t allowed, looking up addresses in order to tell people something they didn’t want to hear after too many seasons of nothing but bad news. And it shocked me how much building was going on: decks, dormers, even a garage or two, all with punky boards, water-stained shingles, windows bought on credit. It was almost like a rain dance, people hoping the illusion of prosperity would conjure a miracle and that the three o’clock whistle would call us all back to our stations.

The job, which I was lucky to get, was not without its wonders: on day two I discovered Ernie Whitten. The man didn’t appear to know me, though I recognized him as a pipefitter who used to work on my cousin Lenny’s crew. From the look of him—deep lines cragging down his face and a dustbunny of a dog that ticked along at his heels—I figured he’d been ten or twelve minutes from retirement before we struck. He was constructing something out of scrap lumber about four inches from his property line.

“It’s an ark,” he says to me, and it takes me a while to see it. It was tall enough to require staging and shaped to sink like a stone. He’s gone a little nuts, I’m thinking—he’s been keeping the neighbors up with floodlights and power tools—just nuts enough to weather the strike and the shutdown and the pension rug being pulled out from under his feet. It occurred to me that I might have channeled my own disappointments into something slightly more constructive than popping my little brother on the mouth.

It took a few minutes to explain to Ernie who I was. When it finally came to him that I was from code enforcement, he folded his arms and clammed up. I didn’t take offense: I was too busy wondering why in hell an ark was materializing on a striking pipefitter’s lawn. And I was thinking, too, of the boat Timmy made
when he was four years old, a clumpy rig made of knockoff Lincoln Logs that he carried everywhere. Timmy’s boat would float for one wavering second in his blowup pool, then shimmy painfully to the bottom. “Let me fix it for you, my man,” I’d tell him, my pants already wet at the cuffs. “No,” he insisted, clutching it to his pink chest, “I like it broken,” and there was no talking him out of it.

I didn’t think Ernie’s ark would float any better than Tim’s broken boat, but there he was, defending it against my clipboard and pink papers. He stood with his legs apart, like a sailor at the helm. The tiny dog quaked behind one of his ankles.

“Nice little dog,” I ventured, trying to look friendly.

“My wife’s,” he told me. “She’s in the hospital.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said, putting my clipboard behind my back. “I’m sure she’ll be on the mend in no time.”

“Doesn’t look like it,” he said. It didn’t take a genius to read between the lines: cancer kills half this town sooner or later. I looked up at the ark, at its odd, intimidating presence, and feared I hadn’t lived the right kind of life to be able to understand what it was doing there.

I fell into the habit of cruising by there at night just to watch the man work. I’d park across the street with a sandwich and a Coke, Junie sitting in the back, approving. She’s a beautiful old dog, a yellow Labrador retriever with flappy chops that make her look like she’s smiling. I got her the day of my divorce, a creaky pound dog hours from doom. Every time Ernie got home from the hospital and set to work, Junie sat up and smiled.

The thing started to resemble a picture in a kids’ Bible. He had the roof almost on when the city, which was getting stingy and mean in the strike’s wide wake, sent me back there with a
summons. The ark was illegal on several fronts, and it was my job to fine the guy and get him to pony up.

His wife had come home. At first I was so happy to see this that I hopped out of the car as if I were their visiting grandson instead of the code guy with bad news. Halfway across the lawn I saw that no bad news I had to deliver could be worse than the news already visiting this house.

She’d been bundled into a chaise lounge on the sunporch, her exposed face whittled down to skin on bone, and all of a sudden I was very sorry that it was too late for me ever to have been with a woman as long as Ernie Whitten had been with her. I’m thinking she’s waving at me, her tiny, see-through hand wrenching out from the blankets, but of course it’s her husband she sees, standing on the roof of their ark. “I’m sorry, Mr. Whitten,” I’m calling to him. “It’s my job.” He just goes on nailing and hammering and checking the porch every couple of minutes to make sure she’s still watching.

This was late November, the weirdest on record. One sunny day right after another, temperatures in the sixties. I’m talking day after amazing day. All of a sudden Ernie sees my camera, with which I’m supposed to gather evidence, and asks me to take his picture. He wants the dog in the picture, too, plus my dog, animals two by two, and while I’m getting the dogs to pose, he gathers up his wife and carries her over the gangplank like it’s a wedding threshold. I couldn’t help but think of my ex-wife, who was at least trying, starting all over with her sculptor and his kids and her perky flower shop. And Tim, too, saving money for his future marriage to a woman he fully expected to meet. And here was a guy with expectation all behind him, building an
ark that had no obvious purpose except to please his wife. I gave him the developing Polaroid and left the premises, summons undelivered.

As if my thoughts had conjured him, Timmy turned up on my doorstep that night, and Christ if I didn’t think he was six years old again, bringing some mangled squirrel in from the road. Then I got a better look at the squirrel.

“Jesus,” I said.

He sat on my stoop and laid the cat over his knees and bawled like a baby, his narrow shoulders heaving, snot and tears gumming down his face.

“Jesus Christ, Tim,” I said. “Who did this?”

“You tell me,” he said, though his words were so bollixed up with liquor and despair I could hardly make out what he was saying. I went to touch him, maybe knock him on the shoulder or something, some stumbling motion in the general direction of forgiveness, but he batted my hand away. I was thinking of him at twelve, and sixteen, and he was the same kid now at twenty, minus the freckles—too sensitive for his own good. For the second time in a day I was face-up with a sorrow I had no means to understand. My brother’s crime was in wanting to get out so badly he’d step on his brothers’ necks to do it. It had cost him big, but he was willing to pay. That’s how much he didn’t want to end up like me. As much as it hurt me to know this, I couldn’t think of a blessed thing I wanted that bad, and a weird, vague, crushed part of me wished I did.

“I’m leaving town,” he said, getting up. “I said good-bye to Aunt Lucy, and the rest of you can go rot in hell.”

“You can’t say that,” I said. “Don’t.”

Timmy turned around, holding the cat against his chest as if it were still alive and settled into its favorite spot on his body. “They’ve got two-inch-wide minds, Danny,” he said. “Sonny and Roy and the rest. They turned you into an old man with a dog.” I watched him wend down the road toward his apartment, crying over an animal who’d been half-dead for about two years anyway.

I suppose it could have ended there, and would have, except for that Sunday afternoon, two days later, when I got the urge to jump. The sky hung low and, as I said, snow was in the air. As I considered the down-below rocks, it occurred to me that I’d been watching a man and his wife make their complicated good-bye. Maybe my brother and I owed each other something like that.

When I got to his apartment, he was packing the last of his stuff. “Where are you headed?” I asked him.

He was crating up some camping gear and didn’t look up.

“Tim?”

Still no answer. His rapid motions sounded like a beating:
slam, bam, bang
.

“What if something happens, Tim? How do we get in touch with you?”

“Aunt Lucy will know.” His forearms flexed mightily as he stuffed a jacket into an already full box. “If you’ve got something to say, you can tell her.”

“I didn’t kill your cat,” I said.

He continued doing what he was doing, furiously cramming gear into too-small spaces. “You might as well have, Danny,” he muttered. “It might as well have been you.”

I stood there, in his stripped apartment, feeling hot and choked, as if someone had set fire to my internal organs. “Listen, Timmy,” I said. “There’s something I’d really like you to see.”

Finally he looked at me. And maybe because Junie was with me and appeared to be smiling, he consented to come for a ride.

By the time I parked, snow was coming down in a sloppy, grayish onslaught that was half rain. The ark, alone on the lawn, resting on its flat bottom, looked both finished and abandoned. I kept the engine running, and the heater, and the wipers. I left the radio on low in case we had nothing to say. Junie spread herself across the backseat. I cracked open a beer and handed it to my brother. The car felt cozy, in a way.

“It’s not a bad-looking boat,” Timmy said, grudgingly. “Kind of tall and beamy.”

“I’m supposed to make him take it down. Poor guy’s right at zero on the happy scale. Two degrees, maybe, if you count the dog.” He didn’t say anything, so I kept going: “I’ve been wondering if maybe God halted the weather fronts or what have you just so this guy could finish a going-away present for his wife.”

The car swelled with the ticking wipers, the dog’s breathing, and the radio’s quiet static. “It’s not a going-away present,” Tim said quietly.

I flicked off the radio. “What, then?” I really wanted to know.

He shook his head, then took a sip of beer. “Look at that thing, Danny. He’s begging God not to take his wife, come hell or—well, or high water. It’s like a totem or something. I don’t know. A prayer.”

“A lot of good it’ll do,” I said. “I’ve seen her. She’s days from dying, Tim. Hours, even.”

“Maybe God spared her. Maybe she’s in there right now trying on some new clothes.” He drained the beer. “For all we know they’re both so happy the mercury’s exploded.”

What snow there had been disintegrated into a steady rain. The hulking, useless ark, so heavy with a stranger’s strange hope, glistened with water. “For all we know,” I told my little brother, “she’s already died.”

Timmy nodded. “That’s the difference between you and me.”

I let some minutes tick past. “Write to me, Tim, will you?”

He was looking at the ark. “Come on, Danny,” he murmured. “What would I say?”

“Say anything. Hell, just buy a postcard and sign your name.”

He nodded. A crisp, deliberate nod, the gesture of a grown man. Our father, whose thoughts contained so little ambiguity, had moved his head in exactly this way.

The rain melted down. Junie was snoring, and the beer was gone. Through the smeared windshield I thought I saw the ark move, a nearly imperceptible rocking at the stern as water pooled beneath it.

“Did you see that?”