Some Great Thing (31 page)

“It doesn’t smell very good in here, Kath.”

“No one’s cleaning, is it? Is anyone?”

“It’s been a long time since I was in here.”

“It’s a good room. Ya built a nice room, Jer.”

“It does smell though.”

“And I’m … sick to death of this room, Jer, to be honest witchyez. I’m sick of it and you say it stinks but it’s a good room, Jer. Let me just lie my head on yer chest there now.”

“It’s been a long time.”

“Yes, Jer, yes it has.”

“Long time.”

“Now, don’t start getting into that, Jer. Just leave it. It’s been a long time. Right. Yes. And if it’s been a long time, there’s all the more reason to forget. I haven’t thought … the idea of having … with anyone … no. It’s ages now. How long is it? Ages. Years. More than a year. More than a year.”

“More than a year.”

“That’s right.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry. Enough, now. Put yer hand back on my head there.”

“Are you tired?”

“Fagged. I can’t stop the tired, Jer.”

“Well, you sleep then. I’ll turn off the light.”

“Don’t turn off the light.”

“OK.”

“I’m sick of the dark.”

“It stinks. I should open a window.”

“It’s cold. Don’t. It just needs a clean. I’ll be better soon and I’ll give it a proper bang-up clean. I’m just tired. I can’t stop it.”

“Do you want a painkiller?”

“Yeah. Pass us a painkiller. Has it really been a year?”

“More than a year, Kath. Maybe you should see a doctor again.”

“It’s your son that should be cleaning. He should tidy up more, but he’s bloody hopeless.”

“He’s been looking after you.”

“Not much, I tell you. Not much, Jer. Have ya noticed that his voice is breaking?”

“Is it?”

“That’s right And you know what that means. He’s off masturbatin on his sheets all the time and not doing what he’s supposed to.”

“Does it?”

“A breaking flippin voice. I’ve got a son with a breaking cracking voice, like with age, cracking with the passage of time. I’m not that old, am I, Jer?”

“You’re not old.”

“I notice yiz have lost some of yer hair there.”

“Sorry.”

“I like it. But it all means I’m old, Jer. He’ll have hair under his arms, too.”

“He will.”

“He does. I’ve seen sweat marks, and he smells like a man, Jerry. And hopeless. Christ I feel old, Jerry.”

“Relax your head there.”

“I feel old.”

“You’re not old.”

“Too old to change anything. Change is just happening, isn’t it. It just walks in and out of the room with a breaking flippin voice. I want to change so much, Jerry.”

“Just relax.”

“I’ll just get over the tiredness. Then I myself will change, Jerry. I promise I’ll get better.”

“You need some fresh air. That’s all.”

“Yeah.”

“How would you like to live by a golf course?”

“Lovely.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ll change.”

“You just rest.”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll turn off the light.”

“No.”

“Have a sleep on my chest.”

“Yeah. Goodnight, my Jer.”

“Night.”

B
Y THE TIME MY
own voice broke I was on my way to my apprenticeship. When the world was iron and cold, that’s what a young man did.

I don’t believe in that sort of suffering. I believe in the fat of the land, milk and honey, yes. You might not expect that of me. I don’t believe in work for its own sake. It’s like believing in faith and ignoring God. There has to be a point to all that work. I was accumulating some sweet little vats of milk and honey for my son, my friend, and a whole lot of fat. I didn’t want him to do a bit of work if he didn’t want to, because I knew, somehow (faith), that he was a handsome piece of perfection who needed none of the necessary whittling that work can sometimes do. He didn’t have to lift a finger. I had all those secret vats, all that tasty fat.

But up he comes with his cracking voice, saying, “Dad, I think I need a job.”

Boy he made me proud.

“A job, eh?” I wanted to hear him speak more because that voice was giving me little shivers of surprise.

“Yeah.”

“What kind of job?”

“I don’t know. Work. Have you got any work?”

“Have I got any work? Did your father marry a beautiful woman?”

“…”

“Yeah, I’ve got work, buddy. You’re just in time. It’s all happening. More work just got approved, so after we pop a cork in
honor of your father and the wall-maker’s trade, we have a lot to do.”

I gave him a taste of everything. For about nine months there, he was working in the mornings before school, in the evenings. He worked in the site office, helped some of the girls with whatnot. He worked with the road builders for a bit, shoveling the tar. He worked on Cooper’s team. He still loved Cooper. “He knows things, Dad. You don’t understand,” he said.

He built a wall or two, my friend, so praise his precious hands.

I paid him generously. He was the richest fourteen-year-old in Ottawa South, probably. I’m afraid that I didn’t watch him very closely, though. I just heard what he was up to from other people, in passing. Turns out he was saving.

I
WAS AT THE
peak of my career. People knew me. “McGuinty’s good. Builds a fine home.”

“I see you live in a McGuinty home. That’s fine.”

“Oh, yeah. McGuinty. He built a lot of the best stuff around here.”

That’s the sort of thing you might have heard if people talked like wood. (It was from my radio ads, actually. Very effective.) People came to
me
with proposals.

“I’ve got a subdivision out in Nepean there. You want a piece of that?”

“We’ve got a nice little piece of land out Gloucester way—care to come in on that?”

I became a bit of a brand, a badge of quality. People wanted my involvement in their projects so they could put my name on their signs. You know you’re a success when the least tangible thing about you becomes valuable. Not your speed, not your ability, not your fists or your possessions—your name. McGuinty.

I
am
Jerry McGuinty. I was scheming, planning, closing, laughing, struggling, having, wanting, growing seriously big in the gut.
I was aware of nothing but what I had to
do
. And more than anything I was convinced that what I had to
do
was build a golf course.

I was too busy to wonder why. I caught myself imagining I would one day see Kathleen driving around the kingdom outside my window, my kingdom, in her own little golf cart. I imagined I could own the limits of her world: everywhere she drove was
Jerry
. I didn’t think about why. That’s the nature of business and dreams. I suspect that you have spent most of your working life dreaming of owning an art gallery or moving to an island to open a scuba shop or something laughable like that. When you get close to it you’ll realize that you can’t paint or you don’t actually like art, that you’ll be bored, that you’ll be broke, lonely, frightened, that to succeed you would need twenty years but all you’ve got, at the most, is ten.

With me it was different. I was busy, sure, I was dreaming, yes, but the one was not unrelated to the other, and I am, after all, Jerry McGuinty. I could do anything.

An exclusive group of my finest homes. A golf course with an abundance of this grass:
fescue
. Elegant lines, straight, views of trees, glimpses of sport, a sense of belonging, a great deal of money for the man with my name.

I know, I know, I agree with you. The suspicion that we can’t have what we dream of is what keeps us dreaming. We know that because we are wise. We didn’t know it then.

I suspected this golf-course development would be hard to hold in my hand, and the more I suspected that the more I longed to hold it. It was more than a suspicion, too. You saw the letters. I was up against some secret department of powerful nerds.

Now, maybe the Government wasn’t conspiring to destroy me personally. I’ll admit that. I’m not armed for a revolution at the moment; no camouflage on me, see. But they were up to something with this land. They are always up to something and it’s never something good for the simple folk—like they think I am.

N
INE MONTHS JERRY WORKED
. Close your eyes and count to nine. It doesn’t seem like much could change.

I had forgotten that Kathleen might need some attention. Jerry working in the mornings and then again after school meant no one was around the house. She told me she was feeling better, she didn’t need help, that us two Jerries could feck off with our mollycoddling and our moping moony faces.

She seemed better, a bit more of her old spirit back. I do remember that she made dinner once, the first time in ages. She burned a couple of things, Jerry tried to help, she pushed him away. She definitely had some strength left. It was still a good dinner.

She cut herself once, just a little cut on her finger but it bled and bled and bled. I thought that was odd but she just said feck, feck, feck, like it was just a little nuisance. Generally I thought she was getting better.

But Jerry knew. He was going home a lot, I later learned. He wasn’t looking after her any less than before. Running off from work all the time, every day. She had him scared, I learned, so scared that she could make him do anything. He would run home, then run back to work, run home again, make all his own meals, do everything she wanted.

He came to work with me in my truck once or twice. Usually he was up even earlier than I was because he wanted to get some good hours in before school.

“You’re a little nut,” I told him when I was driving him one day. “Why are you working so hard?”

He has this silence that frustrates me.

“Seriously, buddy, you’ll wear yourself out. Your career will be over by the time you’re eighteen. You’ll have to retire when your friends are just getting going. They’ll be visiting you in the retirement home before you start shaving, eh?”

“…”

“Seriously. What are your friends doing? Are they working? What do they think?”

“…”

“Maybe we should have your friends over. Who
are
your friends?”

“Fuck off, Dad.”

“OK, buddy.”

T
HE GIRLS IN THE
site office, they say my Jerry’s sweet, makes paper airplanes all the time but does his work. Spells OK, too, they say.

And Cooper—the only compliment I ever heard from him—he says Jerry’s a good guy.

You know, as the seasons permit!

I had to pay for these catalogs of leaves and goddamn groundhogs. I had to pay someone to tell the Government that, generally, the winter witnesses an abundance of sleeping groundhogs.

It turns out that there are birds and trees which might be affected by development.

Rock my world!

It also turns out that over the seasons, “There is change, such as erosion, delicately balanced. This is significant,” is what one report said. That was the last sentence of that section of the report, which I spent money on: “This is significant.”

As opposed to the small number of golf-course architects in the world, these little guys who do environmental studies were Legion.

“The world is changing.” That’s what the golf-course architect said to me, chewing philosophically. “You can’t just lay things down anymore,” he said.

He was right. But he was also on retainer, so I didn’t want him telling me what I knew. When he talked about his trade he interested me.

“You don’t golf, Mr. McGuinty, so you might not know this. Golfers don’t want to feel like they’re playing on a suburban street. They don’t want to see houses looking at them all the time. Now, you build houses so you probably do know this: homeowners want to see the golf course. They want to see the grass, the trees, maybe a golfer or two. What’s the solution?”

Now he’s earning his money.

“The solution is to put the houses on high banks, have the course lower, put berms and woodlots between the course and the subdivision.

“And we want it as natural as possible. I think we should have the course looking kind of rugged here and there. So a links-style course with a fair amount of fescue grass.”

That was the first time I heard that word: fescue.

“Maybe even some stone fences here and there, and hedgerows. I’ll need to do soil samples to consider drainage. Let’s meet out at the land and I’ll tell you some more. Ever been hit in the head by a golf ball, Mr. McGuinty?”

“Nope.”

“Well, that’s a very basic thing to keep in mind as well. I’ll come up from Toronto and we’ll have a good look at the land. You can find me somewhere decent to stay, I suppose?”

So I put him up in a shitty hotel that he complains about, but he comes out to the land with me and he earns his money a bit more.

“Irrigation and drainage, Mr. McGuinty, are probably the most important considerations in any golf-course development. If we’ve got impermeable clay here or porous soil, we’re obviously going to have stability problems. Some of it might be easy to shift around, as I’m sure you know, and it might help the golf course drain, but you’re going to have to decide whether your development can be supported, especially if we want to raise it above the golf course.

“Generally speaking, I build a course that I know can withstand the worst storm in any five-year period. I’ll need to know weather patterns, certainly. We’ve got to consider how the houses are going to drain. Having them up high will be an advantage that way too, but you’re going to need pipes, capital P, Pipes, to get the water we don’t want away from the course.

“Now, there are some natural ponds, which will be good little challenges on the course. We might want even more of them so you can save on pipes. I happen to know some varieties of aquatic plant that can help make healthy ponds out of the drainage—keep the shape of things, settle suspended solids, even control coliform bacteria, Mr. McGuinty.”