Architects Are Here (2 page)

Dave and I spent our teen years hanging out in each other’s basement. I preferred his basement because the cement floor was painted with a grey marine enamel that you could slide across in your sock feet. His brother, Zac, had a race car set and a cardboard rocket that blasted six hundred feet in the air and landed with a parachute. His father was the first person to offer me a cup of coffee made in a bodum. We shot hoops above the Twombly garage door and we drove our banana bikes down to the river and constructed dams on tributaries and in winter we made our mittens into puppets and the mittens, puddies we called them, smoked cigarette butts that were still lit. They were cigarettes we picked up after people had tossed them. We were privately childish and publicly strong. We both boxed and were in the same weight division, although I was tall and jabbed while Dave worked inside and hooked to the kidneys. Once, while sparring, Dave sent a hook to the temple. I was down. I felt the buzzle and lightness of my body. I woke up on the canvas and a dullness in my skin. I had been out. I was out for about ten seconds. It made me realize this is what death is like. There is no life after death. There is no duration in the dark of waiting.

As teenagers we grew our hair long and feathered it and we bench-pressed with Zac’s friends with a barbell and weights made of cement in gold plastic casings. We played handheld electronic sports games and stole valve caps from the wheels of fancy cars that we screwed onto the chrome rims of our ten-speeds. We grew soft moustaches.

We were the last of the Grade Elevens—they were phasing in Grade Twelve to keep us up with Canada—and so we graduated high school at the early age of seventeen. Because we were so young we decided to stay in Corner Brook for our first year of university. There was an offshoot campus where you could do two years of a degree, and they would not accept you at any mainland university with only a Grade Eleven. So we signed up for English and physics and geography and I chose an elective offered by Dave’s father. Professor Twombly taught communications. And this is where I met Nell Tarkington. She was in the class. I noticed her because she was new—Nell was one of the only students on campus who was not from the province, and so a curiosity attached itself to her. She was tall and wore shiny dark hair and when she answered a question she leaned forward in her seat and curled her shoulders a little. I realized there were other shapes and physiques to both men and women. Because I was English I did not look much like a typical Newfoundlander. Anthropologists and linguists parachuted into our island with six-week projects that analyzed an isolated gene pool and accents that have withstood the North American persuasion for twelve generations. This was something we learned in Professor Twombly’s class. He brought in music and documentaries, and one film was about the premier visiting Cuba with Geoff Stirling, a Newfoundland millionaire who was involved in radio and television. I remember Mr Stirling standing on his head on the Cuban beach. Joey Smallwood composed questions aloud for Castro. Between Stirling and Smallwood, on the screen pulled down over the green chalkboard, was the silhouette of Nell’s shoulders and head.

Nell was someone who, if I had to be slightly perverse, looked and acted a bit like me. But I was shy back then and sat at the rear, whereas she favoured a desk up front. She was, I guess, a keener.

I paid my tuition that year with summer jobs. The only thing I knew to put on an application was manual labour. I used a drawbar and ripped thousands of linear feet of clapboard from old houses. David worked with his brother on tech assignments that involved video equipment and digital software—Dave was the first person I knew who owned a CD player. That fall I lived at home and worked four-hour shifts at McDonald’s up on the highway. I was there when they changed the sign over from 999 million served to 1 billion served. I worked with Joe Hurley and I’d meet him down in the valley and we’d ride up together on our bikes until the snow hit in November. We grilled burgers and toasted buns and drained the grease troughs into plastic cartons full of ice, and walked around the lot emptying the castle bin liners. I liked working close with Joe because we got to take down the flag, and the maple leaf fluttered over the highest point of land over Corner Brook. We felt like explorers.

That first year was pretty much like high school, though some of the harder cases were not around any longer, and both Zac and my own brother were about to leave home for work elsewhere on the planet. Zac was twenty and had been studying in Michigan, where his parents were from, and he was being headhunted by firms in Seattle and also Palo Alto, a place I had never heard of before but was the cradle of the new age about to befall us, Zac said. That of the microprocessor. Zac had started a small company that David now helped run and, before Zac left for the West Coast, he wanted, of all things, to go moose hunting with his brother. How many chances will I get to do this, he said to Dave. And we both imagined him, in hot California, driving his blue Matador into town with a set of moose antlers cinched to the roof rack.

The Twomblys have a cabin on Grand Lake and they hunted from there. Zac had applied for the hunter’s safety course and bought a rifle with his father at an RCMP auction at the Rod and Gun Club. I operated the trap shoot there on Wednesday nights through the summer, and Zac would drive up in his blue Matador and step in line as the clay pigeons exploded into the spruce brush. Zac seemed the type to smoke, but he did not smoke. Once, when I was twelve, he had told me, privately, how to masturbate in the shower. They had shot the moose up near Glover Island. They were using a seven-horsepower open boat and they’d gutted the moose and packed it in quarters into the boat. They were sitting low in the water, motoring back down the lake to their family cabin at Boot Brook. The wind was a northeasterly and the chain of lakes is a diagonal scar that follows a geological fault that cuts off the Great Northern Peninsula, sinks into White Bay, then travels five thousand miles under the Atlantic and ends up dividing the Scottish Hebrides. They came up into the wind and pulled into the lee of Glover Island to wait it out. They knew the wind dies down at suppertime. It began to slash rain, the flanks of moose wet. They were proud of the moose and did not want it to spoil. There was a pond on Glover Island and on that pond an island. It’s the only island on a pond in an island on a lake in an island in the whole world. They shouted through the storm about how one day they’d camp on that island in the very centre of what they called the planet. They were excited by the plans and they pretended everything was okay.

Dave was sitting in the bow, keeping it down in the waves, and they crouched there in the growing storm. The shore was sheer cliffs and the light was leaving the sky. If they got far enough out on the lake they’d see the Hurley lights on at the cabin next door, the one out by the point, for they had seen Loyola Hurley and they could guide themselves back by his lights. They made a tack for the sheltered side of the lake and when a swell rose Zac nosed into it and they were getting near the far shore, the points of land were breaking away to form coves. They were called the jaws of the land. They had to turn into the wind and then bring the bow back around, and as Zac wheeled her the chop grew serious and the boat tilted high and slammed down and shook Dave, then the bow rose again and he grabbed ahold of both gunwales. Dave twisted around and saw that his brother was frightened. Zac was looking at something in front of them. A second wash of wave from the starboard side caught the bottom of the boat and turned it into a sail and it swivelled the boat forty degrees and a rogue wave swamped them. There was a sizzle of foam and the shock of cold water on his face and Dave was in the water and could not breathe. Then he went deaf and weightless. He found the noise again and the propeller blade of the overturned outboard motor dripping in the air. Then a wave pushed him against the propeller. He looked around for his brother. He dove for him and felt around for him and tasted gasoline and then under the boat which had an air pocket. He found a hairy body inside the boat but it was not his brother, it was a quarter of moose with the hoof hooked under the middle seat. Then something swollen and nylon and it was the hunting kit. He let that go. The yellow anchor rope, taut and heavy. He followed it up and found his brother, hanging on to the side of the boat. His mouth in and out of the water. They were going to be all right.

The anchor rope, Zac said, it’s looped around me.

The weight of the anchor was pulling him off the gunwale. The side of the boat dipped and Zac went under and came up again. The yellow rope wrapped tight around his shoulder and chest. You needed a knife to cut it. Zac’s grip slipped and he went under and Dave grabbed his shoulder and pulled him back up.

Can you unwind yourself.

Dave had a go at unravelling his brother’s arm, the arm felt dead.

Zac was calm. The gutting knife, it’s in the hunting kit.

I saw the kit, Dave said.

He dove under for the hunting kit. It had been in the bow above the moose. He’d had it in his hands and then had pushed it away. The vulgar carpet of moose, like a piece of bog. He felt around the ribs of the hull. He searched for the texture of nylon which he’d felt before. He knew he’d find it because the gutting knife would solve it and he had to solve it. So it panicked him that the hunting kit wasnt where it was any more. And then he remembered when he had ahold of it he sort of let it go again and maybe it had drifted off or sunk.

It’s only an eight-pound anchor, Dave said.

Zac: I can’t seem to move.

Dave searched around the boat. He tried for the bottom but there was no bottom. He was looking for anything sharp now. Something that wasnt technically a knife but could cut. The little can opener where was that. Then he remembered he had a pocket knife. He put his hand down under his jacket and tried to wriggle his fingers into his jeans pocket, but the jeans were wet and his hands were numb and he could not get into the pocket.

Zac, he said. I’ve got a pocket knife but I’m all numb.

He sidled over to his brother and Zac said which pocket and Dave put his brother’s hand on his right jeans pocket. Zac shoved his hand in and he had the knife and he pulled it out but he did this too quickly. They both saw the knife. Then the knife slipped out of Zac’s hand. It glinted and fell through the water and Dave grabbed for it then swam down to find it but he could not see it, he pulled himself down through the dark water and batted for it in the water until his lungs were screaming and when he came up again he realized they were drifting. They were drifting into the open water of the lake. He remembered the contour lines on the topo map and the bottom must be two hundred feet deep.

I’m going to bring up the anchor, he said to Zac.

The anchor rope was threaded through itself in a bowline. Dave tried to carry up the anchor. He had to hold his breath and cradle it. It was an eight-pound navy anchor which doesnt sound like much but there was no way to get ahold of it, his hands were so numb. He carried it in his arms like a baby and kicked and counted seconds. He was giving his brother a rest. He could see his brother’s legs above him and he knew that Zac was going to be okay. Then he had to let go of the anchor. It was like giving up a child. He looked for his brother but his brother’s face was under water again. He tried to hoist him up but Zac was frantic and he thrashed. So he dove again and followed the rope past his brother and lifted the anchor and held it once again in a cradle at his waist and prayed to God it would be all right. He hated having to let go of the anchor. He followed the top of his head to the surface. The black rain and wind. Dave was chilled to the bone and his hands were dead. He was going to die of hypothermia. He could not hold the gunwale now and had to hook his elbow through the very yellow anchor rope that was tying down Zac. They had lost the hunting kit and the pocket knife and even the lighters and the small can opener. He dove back down but there was nothing in his brother now. He pounded his brother’s chest. He opened Zac’s mouth and put his own mouth to him and blew in air on his cold lips, but the air bubbled back onto his face. He thought one last try to bring up the anchor but he could not even get down to the anchor now.

L
OYOLA HURLEY
found them on the shore with the overturned boat. Loyola was my father’s age. As kids we called him Cake Hurley because he worked in bathroom maintenance and the little deodorant cakes that were put in urinals had his name, Hurley, stamped on them and we delighted in pissing on the Hurley name. We did not, of course, call him Cake to his face. Loyola Hurley had the cabin next to the Twomblys and he’d seen the boys go up the lake and knew, when the storm hit, that they would not get back. He had to wait for first light to get his own boat out and drive up the lake after them. He knew where they must have gone for shelter, a place where you can beach a small boat on a shore full of steep hills. He saw the white side of the boat drawn up and there was David Twombly hysterically waving—he must be shouting though Loyola could not hear him over the sound of the outboard, or the way the wind was. Just his mouth and hands wide open.

D
AVE WAS ONLY SEVENTEEN
, and to witness the death of your brother, to feel the guilt of your own part in it, will affect your character for life. People who met Dave Twombly could not guess he suffered such a mishap. But in times of stress, or in moments when he was pushed forward to be talented in the world, the death hampered him, and he became diminished and stepped away from what could have been a big life. I saw it when he arrived back to school—he drove up to campus in Zac’s car. I saw how he sheltered himself, as though people might turn into a storm at any moment.

Not that he lived a small life. He was living large, but those close to him, or those who had known him in his youth, as I did, could see the potential in him. We went to campus until Christmas and then Dave said how about St John’s. He couldnt take the grief in his house. The looks from his mother.