Some Great Thing (12 page)

And his primary tool was the memo, the oldest and noblest form of official advice, born with bureaucracy itself. It told Solon and Cleisthenes how to spill their democratic mess, Augustus whom to tax, where to build, how to grow a god. In Byzantium, in fulgent rooms, it sat on the lap of a meddling clerk. Ancient styli cut its waxen belly. That’s how Simon saw it anyway. He was the inky part of fate.

Once a memo from Simon circulated through the Division, the Division would inevitably follow its advice. The idea behind the memo would metamorphose into an object on the landscape. The Division owned thousands of acres, had the right to expropriate anyone from any land that it wished to acquire; and it was autonomous. No Government department—Public Works, Land and Environment—had direct power over the Division. It was a unique situation, the absence of red tape, the power over so many Government branches, and, in Simon’s case, the power over so many colleagues.

H
IS NAME, YOU SEE
, carried
weight
. Struthers. His father had been one of the Mandarins, the group of great men who created the
public service. They had all been to Oxford (Balliol men), they had all been clever, incisive, shabbily genteel. Public Works, External Affairs, the Department of Finance—these had all been the creations of Simon’s father and his friends. And his father had gone farther, stepped bravely, openly, into the public arena as a member of Parliament and was the trusted friend to two prime ministers. A rare combination of vision and power. Ideas. Ideas had never been so golden.

And Simon inherited the gold. He polished it. The children of these Mandarins all had a destiny to refine the work of their parents. They sailed on their fathers’ names, moved by their advice: Possess an orderly mind, my sons; use guff when you must, but never accept it; keep a strong head for drink—never mix; and before you die, apple of my eye, create something great for your country.

H
E WAS JUST AS
clever as his father.

A sentence, whether moral or grammatical, was his servant.

B
UT IT TOOK SIMON
years to see, to understand fully just how powerful he was, how much he could accomplish. So much time was spent settling into that pale new office, determining what sort of man he should be to all his new peers. True power, he suspected, was not just in a name, but in one’s knowledge of one’s colleagues.

L
ET
’
S SAY ONE SPENDS
a lifetime acknowledging the fact that people rightly distrust oneself. This face, this glib demeanor, ready wit, ease of expression—“I don’t like them any more than you do,” one might say. “It’s not me, I assure you. What you see is not the real Simon. I don’t know who he is.”

Simon could become an exaggeration of what people imagined him to be. Or he could prove that he had substance. He could prove that he was not the creation of others’ perceptions—he was more than just a collection of predictable desires.

B
Y THE TIME HE
was twelve he had built most of the models in
Great Houses of England:
Hatfield, Theobalds, several others. Not very quickly, but well. He had an obsession with gluing his fingers together: that unique combination of numbness and permanent touch. But when he finished the models as best as he could, he felt huge.

If Simon’s father was a great man in the House, how great was Simon, building great houses so much smaller than he was?

His father could build models from scratch. Cardboard, paper, matchsticks. “I will build a ship,” he would say and he would, indeed, build a ship. Simon needed a kit. “It’s a simple matter of imagination,” his father would say. “Imagine what you want, and build it.” It was his guiding principle throughout his life. “The public servant must find out what the public wants. If he cannot find out what the public wants, he must accurately imagine. And once an image is before him, the servant of the public must create it.” That was a pompous speech his father once made upon accepting some medal or other.

Simon built his kits with brilliant precision.

Eventually he realized that the city that contained his father’s house that contained those houses Simon built was small enough to sit neatly on his desk in the Thomson Building. All he had to do was unglue himself.

I’
VE GOT MYSELF A
beer going, and when I swallow there’s a pain high up in that canal that memories run along, you know, between the spine and the heart. Fear on one bank, yearning on the other.

I
MADE A PACT
with Edgar Davies, a while before he fucked Kathleen, that we would pool our resources. There was too much land for one of us, we both agreed, at least at that stage of things, and we could both be powerful if we worked together.

Edgar Davies was a little older than I was and from pretty much the same background. He did a year of college but I’m a foot taller than he is. I can’t say whether his motivation to build was similar to mine, but I know that his goal was different. It is Edgar Davies you can thank for walls that show their screws like pimples, for houses that look too new when they’re built, for the aging sugared porridge of choiceless making-do that all the world has drowned in. And I’m afraid that’s why we got along. We wanted different things.

“Jerry,” he said. “You make the strong houses, I’ll make the shit. If people can’t afford yours, they’ll choose mine. We can split the market.”

He dressed his houses up with language, “half-timber, Tudor living,” “a taste of the dream of Italy,” and sold them in divisions of two hundred. All of them exactly eleven hundred square feet, and identical inside except for the way they collapsed. He had a new alternative to wood every two years, materials like polypro-pylethylfiloplasticene, which an all-knowing God could never have imagined. It was a shame, because he’s a good craftsman, Edgar. But at least he kept things cheap. They were houses for people like
I would have been, one notch above poor, and he only charged one notch, maybe a notch and a quarter, above free. He made his money from volume.

Anyway, we made that pact very early on, on account of the dump trucks. They just weren’t coming to me, so I rode around with Kathleen in her truck to talk to Edgar at his site one day. He was maybe a hole or two ahead of me, which I liked to see. (Close competition is what helps a city spread—without men showing off, a city will never unfasten its girdle.)

Edgar told me the dumps hadn’t been coming to him either, until he started slipping the drivers an extra twenty bucks a week. Christmas fund, donation to the union, that sort of thing. We agreed that the thing to do was to tell the drivers that for the same amount again from me, for the Children’s Hospital or the wife’s family back home, they might do a couple of extra shifts some nights and make sure they concentrated on me for a while.

Soon the dumps came steady, blowing flowers of diesel at the sky, loading up and driving off to share with an unseen pit that “this dirt belonged to McGuinty.”

And Johnny got ready for blasting.

“O
HHH, JER, YA DO
me good like that there, Jer, like that there, Jer, like slow … there, Jer.”

E
VER CRACKED YOUR HEAD
on your spine by jumping on your heels? Try it while I tell you about explosives.

Let’s not make too much of this first job, right, no: I had only two boulders and one small gradient to destroy on that site. But like any other builder I hated the thought of blasting.

Professional blasting is the construction world’s dentistry: pain, expense, and unexpected smells, all for the sake of someone else’s idea of what looks good. I hate the fuckin dentist. The solution is to smile rarely and to handle your own explosives.

You drill the rock in a grid, holes about six inches apart across the area, and you drill down as far as you think an expert would. I did the drilling because grids didn’t exist in the minds of my men. Once I was finished Johnny took over with hungry dribble in the corners of his mouth, running wire down the holes with blasting caps at the buried end.

No sirens in those days, just a hope that everyone’s been told.

“Tony! Get behind the fuckin truck!”

A
RE YOU STILL JUMPING
on your heels? Keep it up and I’ll tell you how to make a baby.

I made a baby. Right then. Right when we were laying those charges.

Funny coincidence
. Laying charges. Babies. You think I’m making it up.

Threading, blasting caps, Boom! Ha!

Cheers.

See, Kathleen and I, I don’t mind saying, had some good strong sex in those days. And most of the time, after she came like a fist, say, I would shout my pearls on her belly or whatnot. But sometimes not.

“
B
EHIND
THE TRUCK, YOU
fuckin
idiot!
”

And Johnny hooked it up all wrong, so back you go and try again. This wire here, that wire there.

Farther
back!
Farther
back!

Then when it all works right there’s thunder from the earth and the world seems upside down.

Stop jumping if you want.

My point is that when you’re near those explosions you feel it Whack! at your feet first. It’s unexpected every time. The smoke, flying dirt, noise—you expect those things. But the Whack! at your feet, the first smack of a long whip that Smacks! again at your neck.

I like it.

J
ERRY WAS NOT A
mistake. Jerry was not my mistake. Jerry was not a beautiful mistake. Jerry was mine and was beautiful.

S
EVEN POUNDS, SMALL AS
a finger.

K
ATHLEEN DISAPPEARED FOR MORE
than a month when the first set of frames went up. I was pretty sure I saw her truck just up ahead, rounding that corner over on Glyde or crawling up the McCarthy Hill. But I never saw her at breakfast, never saw her at lunch, or when I wanted her like a cure.

“Hey, Jerry. Seen your lady the other night driving like a fuckin wild horse. How come she’s not fixing us lunch these days?”

“Where’d you see her?”

“I don’t know. Thirty-six beer in me.”

She didn’t drive away forever. I think. She’s just there—you can smell the exhaust—don’t blink or she’ll speed up.

I thought I saw her one night and I ran a bit, broke a toenail on the steel in my boot. I ran after everything yellow.

It is best to run after everything, especially if you know that it’s probably not what you really want—just a big yellow bag blowing in the night, something ridiculous from who-knows-where, twirling around a corner to who-cares. No meaning, just a flat disappointment that leads to more running. Better than knowing you should stop.

“T
HE TROUBLE WITH YOU
, Jerry McGuinty, is that you exaggerate. And yer blind. I was not gone for a month, I just spent a few days or a week tryin out some new things, sites and that. I like the warm welcome, the flippin hero’s welcome I get—don’t get me wrong, it’s lovely—but bloody Mary, Jerry, a woman can go for a little while collecting herself and it doesn’t have to be a year or whatever ya say it is.”

“A month.”

“A month. Don’t talk to me about months. I can tell you with a
great deal of truth, Jer, that you have no idea what a month means, what … one flippin month can give and take away.”

“What?”

“Never mind. You think I was gone for a month, but it’s the month that’s gone from me. I’ll tell you honestly, Jerry, I don’t feel like getting naked with you just now. What I feel like is a flippin shout of a night, a bit of a bonfire or a bottle or two. That is honestly what I want.”

“All right.”

“But we don’t need to leave the truck. I don’t mean going out or anything, seeing that filthy crew of yours in the bar.”

“What?”

“If ya reach just under that seat there you’ll find a bottle of Dewar’s, there, yeah? Is it there?”

“No.”

“Well, there’s one up … yeah … there we are. Now, do us the kindness, Jer, if ya don’t mind, and we’ll just get happy feckin drunk, if that’s all right witchyez. A month. A month my arse, I couldn’t leave yiz for a month. Now, just stay where you are, for I am a bit fragile at the moment. There now. Cheers. To time flying. To flippin time flying.”

Kathleen didn’t cry very often. Bonfire nights and special occasions. Usually when she cried it was a tactic during arguments. But not tonight, my friend. Tonight she wept from her stomach.

I stood up to comfort her and I rammed my shoulder into that shelf where she cuts tomatoes. Here’s the scar. When I got near her she was crying in such a powerful private way that I never felt farther from her.

We got drunk that night, boy. I got drunk because it went well with my confusion. I didn’t have a clue why she got so drunk.

I was bleeding from my shoulder and we talked about houses, basements, chicken, whether or not she should keep her butter in the fridge, and how there was no feckin way you’d find her accountable
for anything, of any sort, just this minute, because she’s mad, drunk, mad, and it’s all a feckin mess.

That truck felt small, so out we go for a drunk of fresh air, and the whiskey’s alive in the throat, breathes thoughts out lost.

“Why are you so drunk, Kathleen?”

“We’re both drunk, and I’m not.”

“Neither am I.”

“Where did you go, Kathleen?”

“I’m here in the truck.”

“Are you?”

“You’re so small.”

“Don’t talk in that high voice. Ya sound like a man who’s a lady.”

“I’m drunk, Kathleen.”

“It’s good for ya.”

Back inside the truck with half a wrestle, half a fuck in the doorway, and a drunken smile from my beautiful, who’ll fix me a roast-beef sandwich always fresh. I tell Kathleen everything, cause I’m a small man in my heart right now and she needs to know that now because that’s what I am, frightened, kind of scared of her.

“I’ll tell ya what it is to be a strong man, Jer, and that’s stay the feck away from me tonight, but don’t leave, for here’s yer sandwich. Kiss my teeth there, Jerry, that’s nice. I just don’t have the energy … for more.”