The Journey Prize Stories 25 (21 page)

It’s a photograph of a famous snowstorm in 1974 when the city shut down and the world shrank to a single neighbourhood, and the shape of everything was soft and simple for three days.

It was taken in Windsor, from the concrete porch steps of the home where Clive grew up. The boxwood hedge is a column of white with its bare branch tips breaking through the snow like insectoidal cilia. Across Ray Street the bricks and glass of St. Bart’s rise above the snow and out of frame. The hood of the car in the driveway is buried completely by roof-fall and serves as the top of a giant mound that slopes inwards toward the front of the house. The two bodies on the slope: Clive and Carl, both ten, in their parkas, hoods zipped to full power so that their faces are sunk back into furry tunnels clouded with breath. They are lying still, arms and legs straight, like King Tut’s faithful guardian mummies.

Clive pulled it from the album earlier today, the fibres from its shedded matting were tufted on the back corners. He
looked at it for several minutes, and pressed it between the pages of an
Architectural Digest
on his desk-side table with the letter from Carl folded around it.

Now, as Clive stands on a new brick path that follows the natural contours of Victoria’s inner harbour, surrounding the Industry, Clive’s development, he’s got a million things on his mind but Carl’s letter keeps surfacing like a toxic Old Faithful. The timing could not be worse. Clive does not need this right now. This afternoon, in two short hours in fact, the ribbon for The Industry will be cut. It’s an actual ribbon – “ribbon cutting” is not metaphorical. The ribbon is green and will stretch between the two iron lampposts that frame The Industry’s waterside promenade. There will be photographers. Clive’s son will hand the brass scissors to Bob Naussman. His wife and daughter will join with the members of the ARC Development board and lead the first set of unit owners onto the unblemished blacktop of the walkway. Everybody will merge at the berm by the street entrance, where the sidewalk veers under an iron arch, for the unveiling of Jacob Klosterman’s expensive soaring wire heron.

Everything has to be perfect. If the clouds over the Juan de Fuca Strait bring rain and there is consequent drizzle pooling in the subtle warp of The Industry’s fresh asphalt pathways, even that will annoy him. Asshole crows clustering around the brushed steel Industry garbage bins along the promenade will annoy him.

Even the sight of his own son monkeying in his suit with the kayak stands, right goddamned now, when he could be thinking over what Clive has said about his simple role in today’s pomp, is driving Clive’s pulse through his body in what feels like cartoonish lumps in a hose.

And his daughter’s arms are a nightmare of scabbed eczema that she’s refused to cover up with the silk sweater he bought her, and has instead stuffed into her reeking canvas purse. That purse will go or so help him. Her long hair is dankly straight and parted by her ears so there’s a visible swath of angry pink skin down to the neck of her T-shirt. She emanates a dissatisfaction that seems complete and irrevocable.

His wife, at least, is trying to pull Brandon out from his position behind the kayaks, to impress upon his skittering eight-year-old brain the importance of the occasion and the need, for just a little while, to speak like a regular human being and not forever regurgitate the same tired, shrill, yuk-yuks of his pull-string SpongeBob SquarePants doll. His wife, at least, is lending the occasion some appropriate gravity and decorum. This is millions of dollars. This is eight
years
of work. Everybody who counts will be here today. He’s satisfied that she’s working hard to make sure he’s not embarrassed in front of the members of the ARC board and Bob Naussmann, the small-time Harper wannabe whose office stamp of municipal permission cost ARC hundreds of thousands in wheedling concessions and design changes. And he appreciates her very much. Though it’s always hard to forget that there’s something about the way she holds her mouth when she’s talking to attractive men. That there’s something about the way they lean into her ear and the way she gently brushes their hands away that goads him into long fantasies of certainty and revenge.

Things are precarious. Clive is already set to explode, like a solar system–consuming star just about to absorb the last of its fuel.

Goddamned fucking Carl Chellapinko, thinks Clive, I banish you from this world. I put you into the trunk of a rusty Pinto and have it compacted into a square of metal so tight and shiny it could be a piece of modern art.

Workers have been on hand for the last seventy-two hours doing touch-ups and checks at the direction of a hulking contractor who’s rarely seen outside of his van. The event coordinator is on her cellphone, her laughter carries on the wind. Clive must shoulder everything himself. Everybody forgets their job the moment it’s almost, but not quite, finished. Some union loafer has left a bucket of white paint by the kayak stands and Brandon’s buffed Timberlands are just missing knocking it into the water as he swings around the bars. “We’ve been smackldorfed, Squidward!” says Brandon SquarePants. “And then I took a shit!” Because everything is funnier when you say that afterwards.

Goddamn it! Goddamn it, Brandon! says Clive to himself. Fiona, control him! Control control, Fiona. Just for today. So help me. – “Honey,” he yells, “watch the paint there.”

Looking around for a tradesman – “Can somebody do something about that paint?”

The letter from Carl came to Clive’s office, return address some apartment building in Windsor. The Excelsior. It’s neatly written and lucid, though strewn with scribbles in the margin – as though it is of two minds.

Naked, Clive fills a room like a football tackle pad. He’s smooth and a bit rubbery like Stretch Armstrong left in the sun. Swathed in his navy overcoat with a tufting cravat and fresh black crew cut, Fiona’s told him he could be a doorman at a strip club. Just waiting for someone to give him a little lip. He likes to wear leather gloves even in warm weather. He likes the bulge and their slight creak of give when he makes fists in the air.

The Industry is the last parcel of riverside development on the grounds of the old Jenn Cola bottling factory all owned now by ARC, the company Clive started from scratch. Every Industry unit is two narrow floors. The centrepiece bay window is triple-glazed, framed by steel inset cedar planks with prominent ingot work around the corners. The floors are polished mocha concrete, intentionally distressed then resined. Starting at $375,000 you can have your oatmeal in view of the waterway and the metal recycling plant on the other bank only 150 feet away. It’s not a terrible ugly view. It’s a wonderful show. The jaws of the crane plummet into a pile of steel and rise, drooling bumpers and rebar, furry with metal around the mouth. It drops the steel into a crusher while all day long, six days a week, trucks arrive through the chain link bringing garbage, hauling away giant wrinkled cubes of faded wreckage.

It’s a stroke of genius. That’s what it is. What’s objectionable becomes the attraction itself. Part of The Industry’s
appeal is:
the industry
. The way the angle of the promenade – a wooden dock with a slanted stainless steel roof and faux girder columns – points directly across the water was Clive’s idea. A separate sister dock, slender and inviting, is anchored by two sunken posts and the tip of it, holding the kayak stands, floats on clean white pontoons right on the water. It’s the stairs to the theatre. The front row to the show. Clive feels great ownership. Anything is beautiful framed by glass and steel and concrete. It’s all about the frame, he keeps telling himself.

Though. Every weekend for the last month a watchman has had to sit nights on the water because some young scumbag keeps tagging the great curve of lacquered spruce that supports the stainless steel roof. “SeXriTe” or some such bullshit. And there are seventeen more units that need to sell before a dime of profit can be realized – and the Americans stopped buying, stopped even looking, over two years ago. And there’s the columnist from the basically communist local weekly who’s making whatever stink he can about the statistics on a soil sample taken from the neighbouring lot almost twenty years ago. Twenty years ago Jenn Cola was a toppled factory, a condemned ruin that people drove up to in the night to dump their old refrigerators. It was a rat paradise and an eyesore and ARC took it off the city’s hands, removed everything, including the first six feet of earth, and buried the ugly past in new exotic materials that rise now like the realized dream it is, so handsomely in the brown, green, and red tones of the designer’s selected Scandinavian theme.

So handsome and yet there were some who had the audacity to complain, to suggest that the polluted rubble of some forgotten industry was preferable in some demented sense to
this. Who waited until thirty million dollars of investment had already been sunk into equipment rentals, materials securing, labour – waited for that moment to convene the “town hall” and to raise their concerns about heritage and safety with the ARC board in attendance. Dear people, Clive wanted to say, have you never seen the clawed bucket of a giant backhoe break through a crust of ancient cement and not felt some inner sigh of relief? Will you forever save the broken thing just because it reminds you of some imagined rosy, honest past? You life-ruining, bead-curtain-hanging potheads. You foot-dragging crybabies. You lead-fucking-buckets. I do what I can to make this life more ergonomic and pleasing. Jenn Cola is gone, but the world is still full of abandoned wooden warehouses filled with broken glass and stained with industrial lubricant. Go and see them. Enjoy. Let me get your bus fare.

The first of the attendees are arriving. Unit owners parking their Subarus and Volkswagens on a Superseal coated Industry lot. A woman is the first person to emerge from her car. She’s got a light green scarf fashionably bundled around her black hair. She steps out of the open door and unfurls her long slim body. Her shoes gleam dully and the scarf catches the breeze and departs like a ghost of mist through the air. Not so fast that she can’t catch it in three steps, but she looks great, really great. She’s a taste of what Clive has hoped for. It could be a telecom commercial. If one was imaginative one might even hear the moan of some synthetic opera duet to complement the moment. The event coordinator appears stage right to welcome and guide them all into the Roccacio Juice and Latte Bar on the ground floor for a round of wheatgrass and white cacao and vanilla-foamed africanos, or whatever. There is no reason, thinks Clive, that today will not be a perfect day.

In 1974 Nelson Derrick lived, or slept anyway, at the mercy of St. Bart’s in a tiny annex of the church once used for storing
gym mats. It had its own door to the outside that opened onto an alleyway that’s just outside the frame of the photograph Clive looked at this morning while stirring, stirring, stirring his Metamucil into a cold glass of apple cider. The alleyway ran behind backyards from Ray Street through to Locke where the Salvation Army sat in a small brown building on the corner. Nelson Derrick wore flowered bell-bottomed blue jeans that he would have been too old to wear even during the summer of love. A denim jacket and sole-thwacking sneakers completed the year-round wardrobe. In the winter, he had a giant swaying brown bag of a coat given to him by someone at the church. He had gorgeous long hair, like a woman’s, and he kept it clean and silky and he never drank or smoked but only lugged his faithful duffle bag through the alley up to the Salvation Army where he spent his days largely in silence, reading every last word of yesterday’s newspapers by the side doors to the soup kitchen.