The Carpenter (36 page)

—That thing? said Pete.

—You bet. Best view in the world up there.

Pete looked into the river below. The water was the same breathless monochrome as the sky. But where it flowed under the trestle, the water was shadowed in depths of green-black. He watched as a long walleye arrowed lazily into the shade. It lingered and then it darted away. Pete felt reluctant to look at the trestle itself.

—Well?

—What do you do, you just climb it?

—Right up the side. All us kids have been climbing that thing as long as I remember. I might have been eight years old first time I jumped off.

—You’re fucking crazy.

—Oh … I wondered if you’d be man enough.

—I’m not sure why you think this has to be a test of whether I’m man enough.

—But isn’t that how it works for men? Physical challenges and all that?

—So they tell me.

She was ambling over to the angled upright. She stepped out of her tennis shoes.

—Anyways, good fortune comes to those who prove themselves.

—What is that supposed to mean?

But she’d already begun climbing. She moved like a spider, hands gripping the wings of the I-beam, toes curling on the rounded bolt-heads. She scaled the upright and moved fluidly over the triangular brace at the top.

Pete stepped across the concrete pad where the upright was anchored. He took off his sneakers and stashed his car keys in one of them. He grasped the sides of the girder. He could feel his sweat gelling against the rusty metal. He climbed. As long as he stared directly ahead, he was okay. But looking left or right, to where the surrounding landscape stretched away, he had flashes of acrophobia. It lit small fires in his fingers and toes. He was breathing hard. He came to the brace and made the final bodily twists onto the skyward face of the girder.

He lay airless on the sun-blanched metal. His feet stuck out over the edge behind him. The beam wasn’t two feet wide. To his right was a frightening drop to the ties and rails. To his left was an even longer fall to the river.

Pete raised his head. He was sweating into his eyes, clinging to the hard surface beneath him. Veda was fifteen feet farther down the beam and she was sitting. Pete crawled out to her.

—There you are. Sit up, will you?

Pete laboured into a sitting position and groped for the edges of the girder.

—I like it up here, said Veda. It’s so quiet. It’s a good place to get my head together.

—It’s alright as long as I don’t look around too much.

—Just enjoy the view.

—I’m trying.

—It’s a couple of years I’ve been gone. We used to come up here all the time.

—You were never afraid?

—Of heights? No. Never of heights. Heights were always, you know, whatever.

—Yeah. Just like that.

—I loved it in Montreal. God I loved it there, for what it was, for the time I was there. But it didn’t have any good quiet places like this. Like … I think most dudes say they love a girl but by love they mean have. You know. Possess. All those songs, right? All those poems.
I want to have you, I want you to be mine.
I’m not any good at being possessed. But I’m not any good on giving up on men either. They all just interest me too much. That’s my problem. The possessing thing, calling it love, that was his problem.

—So it
was
a boyfriend.

—That sounds so cute. It’s more like how sometimes you know how it’s going to end up. Sometimes you want the pain of it. Right off from the beginning.

—He broke your heart and you skipped town?

—That’s way over-exaggerated, dude. I didn’t say I got my heart broken. But me and him, let’s say I just got my heart right tired out. And when that happens and the going is good, you know, you got to get a move-on.

—I think I know a thing or two about that.

—Don’t think it was all at once. I went east first. I was in Halifax for a couple months, working at a hotel. Then I got a job at Mont Tremblant. I was in Ottawa. But, like I said, I just got tired out. In my heart, if you can see what I mean at all. So I’m going home. I am flying the white flag. I got my hands up and I’m coming out. Don’t shoot, you bastards.

—It’s not your whole story, said Pete.

—It’s whole enough. How bad do you need the names?

—Good point.

They lolled quietly, letting the hard sunlight work on their skin. If he moved his hand to a new position the steel was almost too hot to touch. The hot metal made him think of the bitter cold floor inside the storage locker, how all the feeling had gone out of his hands and feet and ears. In Pete’s waking vision, the hammer was falling even now. He let one hand go from the edge of the girder and he looked at the rust lined into his flesh.

—My uncle is a killer. He killed a couple of men not so long ago. And a long time before that, he killed another guy, a guy who … Well, it doesn’t matter now. A guy who my uncle thought had it coming.

Veda was looking at him. Her hair was sweat-slicked across her temples and her shoulders were bright with the sun.

—Hey, man. Listen—

—I won’t talk about it if you don’t want to know.

—I didn’t say that.

He told her everything. He considered leaving out some details but he did not. He told her of his life and he told her of the months and weeks and last days leading up to the morning of the falling hammer. He told her of the time that followed. Barry who prayed, the boys who stared, his mother whose face became a barren thing, moonscape where two vacant eyes sat in deep craters. His grandmother who could not say anything at all, who just receded more and more into the rhythm the machine dictated
for her. She lived longer than anyone thought she would. A measure of months. When she died, it was at night and none of them were present.

—And this guy, your uncle?

—He’s alive. Like, he shouldn’t be. But he is. It missed his spleen. The bullet. Missed his liver.

As he spoke, he held his hand up, flat, palm down. He moved the hand slowly in front of them. He had no idea what he was trying to communicate by the gesture. Something ballistic. He let the hand back down to grip the girder.

—He was in the hospital for a long time.

—And, what, did you see him?

—No, said Pete. I never did. Now he’s back in jail. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure him out. I can’t. I don’t know if I ever will. He’s a killer … But if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t be sitting up here talking to you. Those men would have broken a hole through the ice and sunk my body to the bottom, or God knows what they would have done. But that didn’t happen because of what my uncle did. Try telling me what that means.

She didn’t say anything. She just sat there for a little while, squinting her eyes and flexing her toes. He’d speculated there might be release in the telling, but there wasn’t. Maybe it would take some time to feel it but for now there was just the day and the heat and somewhere the knowledge of every day that had gone before.

—So, said Pete.

—You’re alright.

—What?

Veda put her hand on his face, on his nose. Traced with her fingers the crookedness of the bone.

—You’re an alright kind of guy.

—This is something you just thought of?

—Mm, maybe. Anyways, come on.

—You want to go?

—The jump is always the best part.

—Right.

She stood up.

—There’s things we’ve got to get to, Pete. Things waiting for us. And today the getting is good.

She jumped off the edge of the beam. She fell soundlessly and crashed through the surface of the river. There was a brief time that she was out of sight, Pete watching for her, and then she surfaced. She kicked out a ways and turned on her back in the water and waved to him. She called his name.

After a short time, he climbed slowly and deliberately to his feet. He was giddy with the height. The view was vast and lonesome. He drew breath from the hot air and he saw in the southwest where rain clouds were gathering slowly, towers of cumulus piled to the sun, old as anything.

Pete bent forward. There was a last moment of contact with the hot steel and then there was nothing but gravity. He looked down, and just before he hit the surface of the river, he saw himself, a fast-moving shadow, rushing up feet-first to meet him.

The author wishes to express his gratitude to the following:

Douglas Abbott
Phyllis Bruce
Catherine Bush and the University of Guelph MFA
in Creative Writing
Roger Caron
Phillip Halton
Martha Magor Webb
Michael Winter

MATT LENNOX
was raised in Orillia, Ontario, and went on to pursue a military career, becoming a captain in the Canadian army. He was posted to Afghanistan between 2008 and 2009, when he wrote many of the stories in his fi rst collection, Men of Salt, Men of Earth, which was shortlisted for the 2010 ReLit Award. (The title story was published in Best Canadian Stories in 2006.) Matt Lennox lives in Toronto and has completed an MFA at the University of Guelph.

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This book is set in Berling, an old-style roman created in 1951 by Karl-Erik Forsberg for the Berlingska Stilgjuteriet foundry in Lund, Sweden. The face has a Scandinavian sharpness and clarity, and it features unusually shortened descenders—an adaptation to the greater frequency of descenders in Swedish.

The Carpenter
Copyright © 2012 by Matt Lennox.

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EPub Edition © JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 978-1-443-40736-6

A Phyllis Bruce Book, published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

FIRST EDITION

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Lennox, Matt
The carpenter / Matt Lennox.

“A Phyllis Bruce Book.”

ISBN 978-1-44340-734-2

I. Title.
PS8623.E5868C37 2012 C813’.6 C2011-905704-2

RRD 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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