Some Great Thing (11 page)

“So you should rest.”

“Nothing else to do.”

“That’s right. Just relax.”

“I might go round to see that nice baker lady. I said we should have a chat some more, and I want her to know I meant it.”

“You should relax.”

“And you should feck off, Jerry McGuinty!”

“What did I do?”

“Go on, fuck off! Get out of my van and work on your flippin land. Go on, get out!”

“But I don’t need to.”

“You’ll need to now. Get out before I throw hot oil on yiz! You vex me.”

“How?”

“Don’t how me. That lady’s got a lovely face, sort of a jaw on her, and now there’s a sad sort of light in her eye just here, sort of wet, and it’s flippin awful to see her not herself. I’ve bought bread from her for a year, and she never had that light before and we
said hello to each other like two strong people, and it makes me angry as fuck! Now get out! They’re buying her and it’s put that light in her eyes, so fuck off, Jerry!”

“I’ve got nothing to do with that supermarket.”

“My arse you don’t, and I don’t care if you don’t anyway. What makes you think I care anyway, you standing there looking stupid because you don’t understand. I don’t know what I’m doing here and I don’t know why yiz are in my van standing there like that. There’s not time for anything, and there you are, standing there. Get out or I’ll put this out on your face.”

She had a cigarette.

O
N THE FIRST DAY
of work five men turned up with tools. Johnny, Tony, Tony, Jerry, and Mario Calzone. Four of them had the look of sleepy
so what
that everyone has who arrives at a new site that’s just an old site in a different spot. They stood apart from me and spat and smoked and shared some morning farts.

Dirt, arms, dawn-red eyes, backhoe standing ready, rusty, day-old beards that never grow. Every site looks the same on the first day, no matter how you multiply it.

I was scared as a bird. All the joking and smells and silences of those early mornings are part of a crew getting used to each other, testing and poking and settling in. Then there is a final silence when the foreman gets men working, but the foreman this time is me.

No time for nerves because Tony Espolito decides to test me early.

“You’re the boss, big Jerry, where the fuck do we start?”

He was wearing the same plaid shirt as me, which pissed me off.

“Where do you fuckin think, Espolito?” and I tossed him a set of keys.

When an engine fires up, men get to work, because noise takes away choices. That’s something I had learned. One rumbling old backhoe with Espolito at the gears made the rest move straight
to what they knew. Johnny to the dozer, Mario guiding Espolito, Antonioni looking thoughtful with a shovel, and Jerry waiting for two dump trucks that were meant to be there, now.

Being the boss is all about posture: hunch like a gorilla when you’re angry, but otherwise stand straight because you’re smarter than the rest of them.

But I couldn’t stand there for long. Dirt had to be shifted. The first long phase is push, push, get your head down, dig and push, shift it and pile it and make some unnatural holes. Basic work and there’s comfort in it. One of the dumps finally arrived, a day before the other, so we had somewhere to put the dirt.

I was ignoring most of what I’d learned and was giving the unions the finger. Proper outfits use the right people for everything, and by rights men like Cooper and the rest should not have been there so early in the project shifting dirt. If you’re a brickie, you come in when the bricks need doing, and if you’re a union type you stand by your wall, build it beyond your reach and you wait for the union to throw food over it until you feel like dying.

We loved and feared the unions like they were big boozy uncles, but it was only the fools who followed everything they taught. As long as I paid these guys a fraction more than their union wage, they would do the work I gave them.

But money boy, money.

That old bulldozer idling in a thundercloud of diesel while Tony smokes a cigarette: that’s my money. That hour when Mario limps around useless because he dropped a rock “Cunt!” on his foot: it’s all my borrowed money.

T
HERE WERE LONG BREAKS
of nothing at first because those dump drivers had not yet learned to respect me. Dirt piled everywhere. Espolito kept digging the big holes, and the other Tony kept running around shoveling this and that. And Johnny and Mario.

Johnny and Mario hated each other because they were exactly
the same height. Johnny was tougher but Mario could swear more powerfully than any man I’ve met, and the battle between words and fists was never so muddy as when those two were together. Mario was always shouting at Johnny while Johnny was driving the dozer: “fuck … fuck … fackunt”; and Johnny would always have to shut down the dozer to hear.

“You’re sucking on that cigarette like a fag tasting cunt. Why don’t you give me one and I’ll show ya how it’s done.”

And down comes Johnny with fists like heads and he smiles and says, “How about I fuck your eye with my knuckles,” and he blows smoke directly in Mario’s right eye. So I’ve got to come over because I’m the boss, fully aware that these men could rape me, and I call a general Lunch! even though it’s ten o’clock.

At lunch we all sit near but apart, and a round of stories begins. Stories on sites have always been the same collection of words—hard, woman, father, beer—used in combinations that continue to grow. They are perfectly timed to add up to forty-five minutes, and they are nicely designed—though nobody mentions it—to take our misery away. You can get a sad story sometimes that makes your heart feel tired from all the uphill crawling in the world, but you’ll somehow still feel better about going back to work once you hear it. Or you get the stories that start nowhere, finish in the same place, and offer no real fun or interest along the way; but they still feel necessary and go very finely with a roast-beef sandwich and a Coke.

Tony Espolito often started things off. He had instinct, Tony, he sensed things. He sensed that Mario, a fellow Italian, was going to lose his face bone to Cooper, so he always jumped in with a story to change the mood. Espolito’s head, however, was a hollow, mysterious place.

“Last Saturday I drank thirty-two Old Milwaukees and didn’t feel a thing. I rode the wife for three hours and cracked my head on the kitchen counter. It was a fuckin blast, and I’m never gonna buy a TV because, fuck it.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“Radio!” Antonioni shouts, smiling, and there’s silence for a while as he looks wise and reminiscent.

“What radio?” Mario asks.

“My father, he have radio.”

“That’s great,” says Mario, “but we’re talking about television right now, and I don’t know why. I’ll tell you one thing. When big Jerry over here pays me a few times, I’m buying a TV.”

“I drank thirty-three Old Milwaukees on Sunday. I like the way it feels.”

“I know a guy in Kingston Pen drank sixty shots of Listerine.” Johnny’s stories were always about prison, and were short.

“I remember,” says Mario, “when I was eighteen, fuckin nineteen, we followed this fuckin friend of ours around, who said, ‘Boys, my friends, I’m gonna show yooz lady cunts what beer was meant to do to a man, and if yooz want to put some money down, I say I can drink one hundred Labatt’s 50s before the clock strikes twelve.’ And this was fuckin three o’clock or something, and we all put our money down and followed this friend, fuckin Giuseppe, around the neighborhood, carrying cases—we all had beers with us, cases—and we walked and sat for hours, fuckin clink! twenty-one! clink! twenty-two! And we was all getting drunk ourselves watching Giuseppe, you know, clink! pssht, and he’d eat the bottle. Couple of the gals in the neighborhood, you know. And beer comes in cases of twenty-four because that’s all a man needs, right?”

“Just about,” Espolito says.

“So fuckin Giuseppe’s up at forty-five beers, and it’s dark outside and we’re just watching him, because, he was a fuckin brag, Giuseppe, always loud and shit, but we was watching him because he was just doing everything, you know being every person a fuckin man can be, quiet, mad, laughing, crying like a little hoor, and running around being funny after the girls. And at forty-five he just goes all quiet and
he gets that look and boom, passes out. I threw up something brown that night.”

“My father,” Antonioni shouts again, “have radio, because my mother, she no want my father on top of her, and my father, he … does not drink.”

He clapped his hands once, and I’ve never seen such confusion among men.

J
IGAJIGAJIGA
!

“Hey fellas. How are yiz? Tony? Ya look filthy. Doesn’t your mother bathe you? Hey, Mario.”

“Hey gorgeous. Whatcha wearin under your jeans?”

“A cleaver. What can I get you Mario?”

“Get me one of them egg sandwiches, baby.”

“Tony, you made up yer mind yet?”

“I have egg.”

“Two egg sandwiches. What about the rest of yiz?”

“Same.”

“Same.”

“Four eggs. I’ll give yiz a discount.”

“Don’t forget your man.”

“I know what he wants.”

“I bet you do, baby. Two melons and a mouthful of prosciutto.”

“Yer a riot, Mario. Feck off and play in the dirt while I make these sandwiches. How’s it going today, Jer?”

“It’s going good. We’re clearing it. I’m going to get Johnny to do the blasting by the end of the week.”

“Ah, good. He’ll like that, won’t you, Johnny?”

“My sandwich ready?”

“How’s it going with you?” I say.

“Good.”

“Good.”

“Fecking awful cause of all the filthy mouths, but I’m fillin them.
I’ve got to get over to the other new site there, that Edgar Davies one.”

“How’s that lookin?”

“About the same, same as this.”

“The dumps keep going to him first. I’ve got to do something about that.”

“Here’s the sandwiches. I’ve put an extra slice of tomato in there for ya, Jer.”

“You’re not going already, are you?”

“I’ve got to. I can’t live off you guys alone.”

“That’s because my sandwich is always free. Here, I must owe you ten bucks. Here.”

Kathleen started sneezing. She always sneezed after making a round of sandwiches. Lots of small ones, like she was counting the tasks she had finished in a cute little language that I didn’t speak. The men always said “Bless you” in tones of love and religion.

“Well, I might take a break since yer paying, Jer. Don’t mind if I do in that case. I’ll just sit up here.”

She never came out of her truck, and I wouldn’t go in while the men were around. And there were rarely any stories when she stayed. I leaned against the counter, just there, by the serving window. And the men stood around, silent, cool, looking at different parts of the world. There was always a good ten minutes of nothing, just the sound of mouths and eggs and whatever washed it down. There’s an invisible thread connecting that sort of group. I’ve noticed it around country people too. Faces look like they’re lost in a private dream, but everyone’s actually observing the same thing. A noon wind crawls across the group like steam, say, and right when it reaches the last of us, Mario will say, “Hot as ass,” and we all silently nod.

We would all notice when Kathleen moved. If she shifted in her chair, Espolito would shift a bit, kick a rock or something, maybe Mario would cough. We were watching her even if we weren’t.

Crusts were usually swallowed at around the same time and that was when someone might spit, tell a joke, make an order, or, in the case of Kathleen, sing some new thought that made you want to hold her up naked and smile.

“You’ve got parsley on your lip there, Jer, looks a bit like Ireland.”

JigaJigaJiga!

“Gotta go, boys. Gotta go.”

B
Y THE END OF
that night the tastes on his tongue were of onions, cognac, and the butter of Renée. O the things he and Renée got up to, as the world looked through his tiny window.

I should tell you about his job.

T
HE JOB, YOU SEE
, the job was created for the man: slippery, hard to know, potent.

Simon and his colleagues shaped a vast area of this city.

The National Capital Division had existed in one form or another since 1899—always with the mandate of planning Canada’s capital. In the early days, the issues were infrastructure, determining how much land the Government would need for itself. The city had changed from a lumber town to the seat of government, and the challenge for the Division was to accommodate the multiplying bureaucrats, scientists, military moustaches and the thousands of burghers they spawned. It was a glorious race of demi-giants in need of an appropriate landscape.

The city was prosperous, and poor, in a way many of us have forgotten. Income ranged from nothing to solid. Words like “railway” and “milk” still had a significance that has partially been lost. There was one hill of obvious wealth in Rockliffe, at the foot of which was obvious poverty, and from there the solid citizenry spread, west, east, south along the canal.

The spread farther outward was as inevitable as that of a middle-aged belly, and the questions raised by both are the same: Can this be stopped? Should it be stopped? What does it say of our character?

The Division removed the old railway lines from downtown, they
created parks across the river, restored old buildings, transformed industrial sites into museums. They rehabilitated, reinvigorated, reinvented. Some of it thanks to Simon.

Issues became increasingly theoretical. When Simon’s job was created, the words “culture,” “heritage,” “values,” and “future generations” were mumbled into coffee and were gradually growing louder. The Government knew what it needed for itself, more or less, and it now felt responsible for setting in the landscape an idea of what it was to be Canadian.

Matters of placement and determining uses were the concern of Simon. It was up to him to decide where the eyes, ears, nose, and wrinkles would be placed on the municipal face: their shape, beauty, depth, where they would go or whether they would appear at all.