The morning he decided to put things back together, Ray walked five kilometres along the highway in the hours when everything was grey except the mountains lightening in the east. It was one of those mean days in November – sub-zero, wet – so he couldn’t wear a scarf or a ski mask because his breath would condense on the wool and freeze, and then he might as well have been breathing an arctic wind. It was still dark, five-thirty, but the sky over the Rockies had reddened, which meant today might be one of those days he’d carry with him to the grave – red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.
Ray drew a cigarette from his chest pocket and fumbled it in gloved fingers. He had four, maybe five left, and too little money for another pack. It always bothered him how smoking didn’t warm him like he expected it to. He removed one glove to light the thing and burned the ends of his fingers with the match, stupidly, like a fourteen-year-old trying to be cool. Nerves, maybe. This valley, maybe. He’d been absent three years, had spent a little time in Cranbrook, a short stint in Calgary, but the places were deadly similar. Too frequently he bumped into things from the past: a person he recognized, some guy with a sledge seesawing over his shoulder. Relics, anchors. They made him think of her.
But all threads lead home, and so does every missing cent and every angry creditor.
The Kootenay Valley stunk of gossip; even the two Calgarians he’d chatted with on the Greyhound were up on local banter, about a cop getting shot in the chest overseas and a tinbasher haunted by the ghost of his dad. He knew people who existed solely for gossip, and given the chance he would bury them all.
He walked under a panelboard sign that read Welcome to Windermere. The only way to fix himself, here in this place, was with his old friend Mudflap. Mud had worked with him for five years, started as a dumb apprentice and became the guy who ran Ray’s company in his absence. Ray taught him everything he knew, and in return Mud kept him living vicariously. He was the kind of guy who planned his mid-life crisis, whose central philosophy was persistence beats resistance. He was also one of the few people Ray had parted with on speaking terms.
Ray found the place after a short walk. Log house, landscaped yard, a couple trucks and a minivan. He was too cold to wait for signs of people awake so he climbed two steps onto the porch and stepped in a pet’s dish and something like the haze he’d lived through took hold of him, and he wanted to bootfuck that bowl across the lawn. He’d have to watch himself, avoid people. Mud could help with that.
He knocked on the door and stood straight. People moved about inside. Someone swore and was hushed. A baby cooed.
—I swear to God if it’s your dad again I’ll kick him in the fucking teeth.
Mud opened the door wearing jeans and a clean T-shirt, a ballcap that said Olympus Electric. He had a dad’s face now, not age-creased but with skin drawn tight around the bones of his ocular and jaw. His blond wife, Alex, leaned on the wall in a bathrobe, arms crossed and foot tapping. She’d always been a good-looking woman.
It only took Mud a second.
—Ray?
—Hey, Mud.
—Jesus, come on in. You want a coffee?
Ray stomped the snow from his boots. His steeltoes were so damned cold he expected to hear them ring as he set them side by side. Inside Mud’s house, he noticed the designer lighting but couldn’t say it surprised him – Mud was an electrician, after all. Years ago, Ray worked in a house where the owner, a plumber, had plumbed beer to every sink. Once, he and his crew puzzled over how to wire a swivelling wall in a framer’s rec room.
He sat at the table and Alex shuffled to the kitchen to make coffee. Mud intercepted her, caught her forearm, and whispered in her ear. She took the baby and left the room. Mud ground coffee beans and heaped three spoonfuls into the filter and Ray watched his hands. They were the hands of a guy who no longer worked like he used to – not nicked and burred from splinters and construction yards, but still callused. A man never loses his calluses. Well, a working man never loses his calluses. Ray used to tell his guys to find a girl who didn’t mind rough hands, and that advice had come to bite him in the ass.
The coffee brewed behind Mud. Ray had taken to drinking espresso because the drip of normal coffee made him lonely.
—This isn’t easy for me.
—I know.
—I’ve got nowhere else to go.
Mud filled two cups.
—Like I told you when you left, Ray. My door is never closed.
Ray wrapped his hands around the mug and felt its warmth. He drank his coffee black, always had. He didn’t consume it for fun or flavour, only as a means to keep grinding on.
—I need a job.
—I’ve got work.
Fucking Mudflap. Fucking reliable Mudflap.
—I need a place.
Mud raised the mug to his lips and held it there. It had a picture of two guys in overalls dancing and a caption that said, You and Me Soul-Brother.
—My suite isn’t finished.
—You’re getting lazy.
—No one to boss me around. Well, someone.
He looked down the hallway toward the door Alex had disappeared through. Christ, she was a good-looking woman.
—A couple days, Mud?
—You got money?
—Do I look like I’ve got money?
—I see you’re bitchy as ever.
—Just old.
Mud pulled his ballcap off and spun it on his finger.
—My suite needs work. You wanna work on it?
—I’d need a place to stay.
—There’s light and power and I think I even put up a piece of drywall.
—Are you serious?
—Just lazy.
He’d hoped for a day or two on the couch, enough to get his bearings and find a place with some snowboarder come to work at the ski hill for the winter, a place where he could get jealous of the twenty-something getting laid every night in the next bedroom. A place to make him feel his age.
—When can you start work?
Ray kicked his pack.
—Got my tools with me.
IT TURNED OUT he didn’t have all the tools needed, but Mud gave him the things he lacked and a threat that if he lost them, he’d buy new ones. Olympus Electric employed two other journeymen and three apprentices. Mud took one apprentice and gave the rest of the team instructions for the week; they wouldn’t be seen except for material runs or if it all went south.
Mud leaned close and spoke in a low voice. —One of them’s a woman.
—So?
—I’m just saying.
—Saying what?
—If you want on that crew you just let me know.
Mud winked.
Ray’s apprentice, a kid named Paul, sat in his truck in the driveway, asleep against his own chest. He drove a ’92 Ranger with green paint peeling to black. There was something sickly frozen in clumps onto the driver’s door.
—Is that egg?
—From last Halloween. Fucker’s too lazy to clean it.
Mud knocked on the window and Paul jolted awake.
—You didn’t load the Bullet?
—I didn’t know what we needed.
—Goddamn it.
Paul climbed out of the truck and pulled his tuque over his ears. He was a spindly kid with curly hair and bony cheeks, long arms that could probably haul more weight than a pair twice as thick. He moved with a long, awkward gait; his boots slapped the driveway every time he stepped, as though he hadn’t adjusted to the weight of his steeltoes. Mud pointed at the things they’d need for the day and Paul packed them in the work truck, a ’79 Dodge with a metal material box bolted to the frame, aptly named the Silver Bullet. Mud’s father-in-law built it for him during his apprenticeship, and as much as Ray made fun of the beast, it held as much gear as a van and burned twice as much gas. It looked like a shed on wheels, and the running gag was to screw crushed beer cans to it, because Mud never removed them.
Ray offered to help load. Mud shook his head.
—It’s like obedience training. The kid’s got one hell of a lip so I’m trying to breed it out.
—Does he know?
—That, or it’s starting to work.
So his days went. In the mornings he’d wake and brew a pot of coffee and make two peanut butter sandwiches, grab his tools, and head out to the Silver Bullet. He’d start the thing so it was warm by the time Paul arrived, always on time. He’d sit in the driver’s seat and drink his coffee and smoke while Paul loaded the things they needed for the day.
Mud put him and the kid in charge of wiring a fourplex condo unit. The entire thing was built on two lots, with room on each side; they were tiny, and constructed with each cost cut as low as anyone could get away with. The studs twisted near the tops – culled lumber bought at a fraction of regular price. The place smelled like snow and sawdust and as though someone had pissed in the corner, and someone probably had. He marked the locations for plugs and lights and Paul scurried behind him with one end of a wire spool in his fist.
In the evenings Ray worked on the suite. Mud gave him free rein over the design, access to his supplier for any materials needed, and a budget. Ray added recessed lights over the dining area, a track in what would be a small kitchen after he pulled in the stove. He worked two hours every day. It gave him something to do. He only went out to get groceries, and occasionally with Mud for beers at the City Saloon. He had friends in town, still, and they called him one by one. They wanted to know how he was doing, if he needed anything, if he’d heard any news about Tracey, about her painting company. He’d tell them they’d drink beers and they’d be satisfied, and he’d hang up and press his forehead to the raw drywall and think about how far he’d come, and how far he had yet to go.
HE CAME OUT THE door on a day in mid-December and found most of Olympus Electric’s crew gathered outside the shed. They were two journeymen and an apprentice, named Philippe, Clay, and Greg. Philippe was in charge; he was a stubby Frenchman with a white cowboy hat who slurred his e’s.
—How’s the dumb apprentice?
—He works hard.
Philippe fished into his pocket and snatched a pair of pliers. He started clipping his fingernails.
—You used to be Mudflap’s boss?
—Yes.
—And now he is the boss.
He’d been warned about Philippe, the way he’d look down his nose even though the top of his head barely measured to Ray’s chin. He had eyes like a pair of gun barrels and he sniffled each time he clipped a piece of fingernail.
Ray lit a cigarette.
—I’m just here to help out.
Philippe stopped with the pliers held level with his chin, his hand half a foot from his face.
—It is good for you then. We are glad to have you.
—Where’s Mud?
—In the shed with Kelly. She is angered with me because I try to make her work and she does not. I tell her to bring the things, she does not.
—You make her haul everything?
—She is the greeny. She must do these things.
Mud came out of the shed with Kelly behind him. She had high cheekbones and tight lips bent into a scowl. Her brown hair hung to her shoulders beneath a grey ballcap. She was taller and she wore a denim jacket over a grey vest, and an Usher T-shirt beneath that. She must have been at least Mud’s age. Mid-late thirties, maybe.
Mud took his ballcap off and ran a hand through his hair.
—Ray, you have enough work for one more?
—Sure, but no room in the Bullet.
Mud nodded and secured his cap on his head. He strode to Paul’s window and Paul started unrolling it, frantically.
—You’re driving your own truck today. Bill me for gas.
Ray climbed in the Bullet and leaned over to unlock the door for Kelly. She got in and chucked her tools on the seat between them. He snuck glances at her as the Bullet trundled down the highway. She shifted and eyed him, patted the unoccupied middle seat. A curl of dust drifted from the fibres.
—There’s room in here for Paul.
—I don’t like rubbing up to that kid. He enjoys it too much.
He saw her relax. She put her seatbelt on.
—What do you think of Phil?
Ray wrung his hands on the steering wheel. The windshield started to fog so he cracked his window, thought about lighting a smoke but didn’t know if she smoked.
—I think he’s a twat.
—He is. Mud’s good shit.
—Mud’s good shit.
In his twenties he used to cruise around in a shittier truck than the Bullet, Tracey lodged beside him as he tried to shift gears. She’d wear tight jeans, faded on the ass, tomboy. He’d spill his beer and swear and she’d drawl a “whatever” between tokes. She never had trouble fitting in with the guys at work. She was smart, good with her hands, but he couldn’t convince her to start pulling wire. She said it’d be too cutesy if they worked together.
—What year you in?
—Just my first. It sucks.
—We were all first-years.
—Not at my age.
—Better than being something lame all your life.
—Like a painter.
Ray startled. He didn’t think she meant anything by it, though she probably knew his history. Everybody knew his fucking history. Kelly picked sawdust off her shoulders and arms. She was a good-looking woman, but not in that fire-blooded way Alex was. She didn’t make him feel his heart in his chest, didn’t make his ears go red. It was different, more subdued.
—Yeah. High from the fumes or the dope in the morning.
It felt good to have a team again. Three guys, a small job. Ray marked instructions on the studs with a fat pen. Paul drilled holes and pulled wire to the breaker panel; he stopped wearing a tool pouch and instead packed his pockets with staples. Ray told him it wasn’t a good idea, because those staples would go right into his balls if he fell off the ladder, and Paul started wearing his pouch again. He taught Kelly the basics of circuit wiring and let her finish some that he started. Philippe only had her haul things and dig ditches, the kinds of jobs reserved for highschool kids and idiots who couldn’t tell an auger bit from a spade. Paul lingered in the rooms while Ray gave advice, until Ray eventually promised to teach him, too, after they finished the fourplex. Kelly learned fast. She’d be going to school in May, and after she got her ticket, would move to Fort McMurray for a year and work seventy hours a week, leave with a hundred and twenty grand. He’d heard the same thing from hundreds of others, young guys who could afford to work themselves like slaves, old guys who figured they’d last a month, maybe, or land a cushy job as a foreman.
He found himself often in the same room as her. She couldn’t keep up to him, but he always managed to find something that had to be finished. A wire too close to the surface needed a nail guard, a light was a couple inches off centre, a few plugs looked too low to the ground so he would have to measure them against his hammer.
At the end of the day she asked if he wanted to come for beers. Ray slung his belt into the Bullet. The first condo had already been drywalled.
—I gotta work on the suite. I took the day off yesterday.
—It’s only a couple beers.
—Next time.
Paul looked up and for the first time actually held Ray’s gaze.
—You sure you don’t want to come?
—I said next time.
The kid knocked on the window of his own truck and Kelly opened it from inside. Dumb bastard only locked the driver’s door. Ray got into the Bullet and lowered the window so he could smoke. The Bullet couldn’t play music. Mud used to haul ass from site to site with a portable stereo plugged into the lighter and bang his head to tinny rock and roll.
THE NEXT DAY, as he pulled up to the fourplex, there was a brown van parked in one of the driveways. The side of it read Excentuate Painting.
Three years ago he’d found that same van, or at least one like it, at the mountain resort he’d been contracted to renovate. His company, Straightline Electric, had to refurbish the condos; the job was to swap minor things like yellowed faceplates and broken light fixtures, work nobody wants to do even though it pays well. He’d been on his way home when he saw an Excentuate van parked at one of the places he’d renovated. Excentuate Painting had been, and still was, owned by a guy named Caine – not the smartest or the nicest, but the kind of guy who knew when and where to buy the beers. Tracey had worked for him but quit when he hired a team of highschool kids to blast through the houses as fast as they could – a kind of fuck-it-we’ll-fix-it-later type approach.
Then, at that resort three years ago, Tracey had come out of one of the condos. She saw him in his truck as he rolled by. She waved. He’d pulled over. Caine came out the same condo a second later.
—Afternoon, Ray. How are things?
Tracey sidled up to the truck and opened the door. She hopped in as though he’d come to give her a lift, as though everything were hunky-dory.
—I might go work for him again. He fired the highschoolers.
After that Ray started asking around. It turned out Tracey spent a lot of time with Caine, and everybody knew it, so one day Ray pretended to go to work and instead sat outside his house in Mud’s Dodge. Caine picked her up in that same van and Tracey welcomed him inside. Ray timed it and could conclude nothing. They came out with coffee mugs. Tracey insisted they were making coffee. Business, she said, always business. Then, on a Friday evening, while Ray drank beers on his porch and watched his dog play, Mud came tear-assing down the driveway, chewing gravel in that Dodge. He stepped down, decked out in his Carhartts and steeltoes, all tans and browns, looking like a man with a secret to tell.
And now, that memory still fresh, Ray couldn’t go inside the fourplex. He pinched the bridge of his nose and tightened his grip on the steering wheel. There had to be a way for him to escape without freaking the hell out of Kelly and Paul. But he couldn’t leave them alone, either, or that’d be Mud’s ass.
—You alright, Ray?
—Need a second. Twenty-six-ounce flu, you know.
He didn’t think she bought it, but she gave a nod and stepped out of the truck and started unloading. Paul asked what was going on and Kelly shrugged. The kid lingered for a second; Ray could see him in the rearview. He wanted to bark at him to get to work but he didn’t need to. They unloaded everything and began without instructions. The painters were in the first condo. They’d be warm and doped out of their heads and wouldn’t wander out to the cold or into the unfinished basements. If he stuck to the ground and to the open air he’d avoid them. He couldn’t see Tracey today. He wasn’t ready for that.
Kelly appeared at the window, but before she said anything, Ray opened the door. He grabbed a spool of wire and his tool belt and trudged into the basement of the last condo, as far away as he could get. Kelly carried two electric drills and a fifty-foot extension cord.
—We starting on this one?
—I am. Finish up over there.
—It’s not pulled yet.
—Pull it. If you get in trouble ask me. If Paul finishes the feeds, show him how to tie in.
He set up his wire spool and plugged in a drill and bored holes through studs and the floor joists overhead. The way the bit curled into wood satisfied him, always had – that hint of heated spruce in the sawdust and at the tip of the metal. He never minded wood chips in his hair and never wore a ballcap to keep them out. Ray’d use sawdust-scented shampoo if such a thing existed. At lunch, Kelly brought him coffee from her thermos while Paul waited in the Bullet. She wore pink mittens over her work gloves that she kept hidden in her lunch kit next to her thermos. Half a sandwich dangled in her hand. She turned the wire spool on its side and sat down. Ray sipped the coffee. It was nearly white from all the milk and way too sugary.
—You need any help over here?
—I’m doing okay.
She bit her sandwich and shoved the food to one cheek as she spoke. —You wanna come for beers tonight?
—Floyd Flannerly’s Christmas party is next weekend. We can have beers then. And they’ll be free.
—I can never take that guy serious.
—Because he’s a plumber?
He offered her the coffee and she washed her food down.
—No. Because he actually wears flannel shirts, she said. She stood, brushed herself off, and saluted. —Too cold. Going back to the Bullet.
He watched her pick her way across the cluttered floor. Her boot caught his extension cord and she had to kick it free. She saw him looking and stopped, her foot three inches above the plywood ground, one hand wrapped around a stud for balance. She looked like the girls on the front of tool magazines, brand-name drills held upright at their shoulders like guns. Except Kelly had a sandwich and not a drill, and heavy grey overalls instead of skimpy shorts.
Tracey used to wear a massive winter coat, open so she could reach the tools in her chest pockets. She preferred wool gloves that left her fingertips exposed, with flaps in case it got too cold to bear. Her hair was blond and ear-length; she had pucker marks from years of smoking, a few wrinkles around her eyes – nothing unattractive. She had been raucous on-site. In the winter she packed a halogen work lamp wherever she went, for warmth rather than light. She was known for being terrible in finished houses, would carry things twice her size and mar the walls, damage the ceilings. It was the way she thundered around the job site that drew him, the way she moved antithesis to everyone else. She would stomp over a pile of debris rather than skirt it.
Kelly shook herself free. She flashed a grin, bit into her sandwich. He dipped his head in a nod and she turned and disappeared.
LATER THAT DAY HE damn near drilled a hole in his leg. Paul gave him a lift home because Kelly didn’t have a licence, and Ray couldn’t operate the clutch. The kid drove with the speedometer not wavering from one hundred, as though Ray would give him shit for going too fast. When they got to his place, Paul stood awkwardly at the passenger door, his arms half-extended.
Ray limped out of the vehicle, turned and faced him.
—You want a hug or something?
—Was thinking a kiss, actually.
Ray grinned. The kid knew how to throw shit after all.
Inside, he opened a Kokanee and sat on the couch. It was times like this when he wished he had money for cable, but he barely had enough for shitty beer. He raised the can and drank half. It tasted like the stuff he used to drink in the States – real manly, real light – and it reminded him of raised trucks and shotguns, a twenty-year-old drywaller named Burt with a backward hat and a stomach that drooped over the edge of his tool belt. They hunted coyotes along gravel roads, so drunk they could barely see. Then Burt shot one and it didn’t die. Ray wanted to finish it but they left it with its final howls rattling in its throat.
He pulled his pant leg over his calf. The drill had only glanced along the meat without boring into him, but it had winched the fabric so tight the muscle was bruised and bloodshot. He flexed it and it ached. Not the worst injury he’d ever taken; in fact he’d be able to work tomorrow, dammit. It was only eleven. So much for the four-day weekend.
Someone knocked on the door. He yelled that he’d be a second, and started to work himself to a stance, but his calf seized and he fell onto the couch.
—Fuck it. The door’s unlocked.
Alex opened the door and peeked through. Her hair was up, but a few strands hung down the side of her head. She had a bag of ice tucked under her shoulder and a small black film canister in her hand.
—I got a call from Mud. How bad are you?
—Not bad enough.
—I’ve got ice and our secret stash of T-3s.
—I’ll take the ice.
Her hands lingered on the edge of the door before she closed it. She wore track pants and a windbreaker, had probably been out running – one of those fitness women with legs like nautical rope. A film of sweat shone on her forehead and she placed the back of her wrist to it, let her eyelids drop. Her shoulders rose, fell. Then she stalked across the room and extended the ice.
Ray took it, careful not to let their fingers brush, and wedged it under his calf. Alex hesitated near the coffee table, arm’s-length from the couch. Ray set his beer down.
—Where’s Madison?
—With my folks.
She toyed with the zipper on her jacket and didn’t look at him. He’d known her longer than he’d known Mud – she waitressed at a restaurant he frequented during his apprenticeship, too young to be taken seriously, labelled an up-and-comer by the sleazebags he worked alongside. Then, when he took Mud under his wing, she always came with him to the parties and gatherings, this crazy, mysterious blonde you could tease but never touch.
—You want a beer?
She shook her head. He scratched his stubble. Fifteen years, maybe more.
—Well. You alright, Alex?
—Can I sit?
He shifted his leg off the edge of the couch, moved over, and shoved the ice up along his calf. It stung his damaged skin. She sat on the lip, far opposite him, and stared forward. He reached for his beer but it was too far away, so she grabbed it by the rim and slid it to his palm. He felt like an idiot and drank the rest and Alex looked at her watch and then set her hands on the flat of her thighs.
—You’ve known Mud as long as I have.
He could sleep with her, right now, if he wanted to. That’s what she was going to tell him – that it’d been a long time since Mud touched her. He’d seen it before, hundreds of times; guys get so infatuated with the new business that they neglect their wives and then their wives go and sleep with fucking painters who get doped each day before work.
—Mud’s good shit.
She drummed her fingers on her knee.
—You ever get tired, Ray?
—All the time.
She turned her palms upward and stared at them, one then the other. They were small and soft, hands that could easily button up a shirt, hands that didn’t grapple power tools. When he did the same, Ray saw only twenty years of scrapes and cuts and decades gone to waste. But Alex read something in her own, or read something in his. Or, more likely, she simply saw right through him. He had no idea what she wanted.
Her eyes fixed on him, those raven lashes, those irises as bright as sparks.
—Sure you don’t want the T-3s?
—Save them for when I drill through my leg.
—The suite looks good.
—Bedroom’s the nicest so far.
She scrunched her nose as though recoiling from a bad smell.
—Do you ever get tired of, you know, this?
—All this?
—I don’t know.
She crossed one leg over her knee and leaned her chin on her wrist. She was such a good-looking woman.
—It’s hard not to. It always seems like everything’s the same until the moment when you need everything to be the same. Then you find out it’s been different the whole time.
Alex bobbed her head. She drew a strand of hair from her face with her pinky. The nail was groomed, curved perfectly around the fingertip. Ray smelled cinnamon, assumed it came from her; the scent of a clean body. She rolled one eye toward him, her face turned only a degree in his direction.
—I knew about Tracey and Caine, before you found out.
—Everybody did.
—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.
Ray shrugged. —Nobody did.
Alex went to the door.
—Are you going to Flannerly’s party this weekend?
—I promised Kelly and Paul that I would.
—Paul looks up to you.
—Only because I don’t rail on him like everyone else.
—It’s more than that.
Ray shrugged again. Alex cocked her head and the tie on her hair loosed, dropped that mane all the way to her biceps.
—You regret coming back?
—Not one bit. Other things, yeah. Part of being human.
—Man from beast.
—You regret me coming back?
That got her out the door. Before she closed it, she peeked her head in.
—What if Tracey’s there?
He’d been mulling that over since he’d agreed to go. Worse than Tracey, he feared she’d be there with Caine and that he’d say something dumb and get in a fight. Caine was ten years younger and he went to the gym every second day. Ray couldn’t afford to get the shit kicked out of him. He’d lose everything, again. And he couldn’t blame everything on the two of them.
—Hopefully I’ll be too drunk to realize it.
—Have a gooder, Ray.
She shut the door. He struggled to his feet and fished another beer from the fridge and nursed it on the couch, counted the hours. Ray’d mulled over other stuff, too: where to go when Mud eventually gave him the boot, how long he had until his body at last failed him, whether Kelly was actually giving him the eye. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say a certain kind of woman caught his attention, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that scared him cold. Kelly did things the way Tracey used to, a no-bullshit approach that he admired and made a show of admiring. But she had rough edges, too – he’d seen the way she scowled at Philippe – and a past Ray would one day have to ask after. He didn’t know her story but he bet he understood how she felt: everyone who falls off a roof usually lands the same way. And if she was attracted to him – if he didn’t, for instance, need someone to pull his head from the clouds – then Ray knew why: broken people are drawn to broken people. That’s the love life he had to look forward to with Kelly: a three-legged race.
Not that it’d slow him, not that it’d sway him. Ray would persist. It’s just what he did.
EVERY VEHICLE IN THE driveway of Flannerly’s shop was a truck. He spotted Paul’s Ranger and pulled the Silver Bullet – the only vehicle he had access to – in beside it. A group of guys smoked outside the shop. Ray recognized one as a lippy plumber named Ben, but the others he didn’t know. He stepped out and nodded. A black Lab bounded from among the trucks and put its nose in his hand.
The plumber, Ben, waved his cigarette at him.
—Hey, Sparky.
Ray gave a deep nod. —You talking to me or the dog?
—The dog’s not a goddamn electrician, is he?
—He’d make a hell of a plumber, though.
Ray winked and went inside. Flannerly’s shop was a giant shed, wired with heating and a television upstairs, unfinished walls, material piled in the corners. The walls were dressed with Playboy tear-outs and posters of girls in swimsuits. It felt like any other shop Ray had ever been in, except six times as big.
Some thirty guys and a handful of women sat in a giant circle. They had two barrels of iced beer and a table with whiskey. Ray set his bottle of rye on the table and poured himself the first glass. Rye and Coke, cut one-to-one. He found Mud and Paul and joined them. Paul nodded and Ray clapped him on the back. The kid wasn’t so bad.
Mud passed him a beer.
—Guess I’m double fisting.
—Ray, Kelly started eyeing you the second you walked in.
—I like Kelly.
—You should. She’s a coug. I’d hit that if I wasn’t married.
Ray winked.
—How much you had, Mud?
—They call me Doctor Love.
Ray shot the last of his rye and took a beer from the stash Mud had beside his chair. Paul sat smiling and mute; his stack of empties was only half as big as Mud’s, but he was doing his best. Bunch of drunken idiots, the lot of them.
Ray spent most of the evening trying to work up the courage to go talk to Kelly. The night wore on. Mud entertained the group with a story about bull riding in Kelowna under the name Texas Dunlop. Some cabinet guy tried to breakdance but slipped on a crushed beer can and twisted his wrist. At one point Mud leaned toward him, elbow in his ribs, and nodded at Kelly. She had gone to the liquor table and stood apart from everyone else.
—Persistence beats resistance.
—I’m not sure that applies.
Mud nodded, sage-like. —Ray, it always applies.
He joined Kelly at the liquor table. His rye was the least touched of all the booze there, still half-full. He lifted it and filled a plastic cup halfway and offered it to her. She took it. He filled his own and they stood, side by side, but not looking at nor talking to each other.
—How’d it go after I drilled myself?
—We’re not going to talk shop, are we?
Ray shrugged, beaten. —Couldn’t think of a way to get started.
She tapped the table with one finger and left it resting there. —Can you drive?
He shook his head. —Not legally.
—How’d you get here?
—Illegally.
She left her drink on the table and slunk to the exit. She stopped in the doorway, pressed to the frame, her Usher shirt visible through the cleft in her vest, and winked. Mud saw the wink – had to see the wink – and put on a go for it grin. When Ray looked back she had disappeared except for the tip of her hand. Her fingers waggled on the wood; the nails were chewed down. His ears went red, and not from the booze. He went out the door. Behind him, the guys gave a cheer.
They walked to the beach because Ray couldn’t drive, and it was about as romantic as things would get, boozed as they were. It was darkening; the sky over the Purcells had turned a milky red. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. The frozen lake creaked, giant ice plates ground like earthquakes, once so loudly she jumped. They leaned against each other. He felt like a sixteen-year-old anxious to get laid. He stopped noticing things, tripped on tiny rocks and almost ate a mouthful of sand. A tree branch, bent and loose like a drunk’s weighty arm, took him straight in the chin. She laughed; he cursed and swatted.
Their meandering took them to the far end of the beach where the sand terminated against a concrete wall. Above them loomed what remained of a wooden fort, weathered to a mottled rib cage lined with insulator’s plastic. A long time ago it was a ferry port, when people traded up and down the Sevenhead River. Ray used to party in it as a kid, had his first blowjob there, pressed into the corner with a bottle of rye in one hand and a fistful of denim jacket in the other, jeans drawn down past his ass.
Kelly gestured at the fort.
—I slept with a twenty-two-year-old there, last year.
From her vest she produced a silver flask, held it flat in her palm with one thumb curled over the spout. She flicked her hair around to the other side of her head, showed off the curve of her neck, a mole perched on the cusp of the jugular.
—It’s chocolate vodka.
Ray let her churn the flask in the air beneath his nose, leaned forward as if to follow when at last she retracted it. It smelled like a coffee house, like dark beans or maybe the liqueur they squeeze into brandy chocolates. When she tipped it to her lips he watched her swallow, her neck again.
He wanted to reach for her hand and lead her away.
Her house was a few blocks away – the basement suite of a thirty-five-hundred-square-foot house. Two other girls, half her age, lived there too, but they’d gone home for Christmas. It was almost, she said, like having a place of her own.
The chocolate vodka didn’t last long. It was the first step in losing their clothes, there in her well-lit bedroom. Kelly slid her hands around his grey-haired chest, over his gone-soft biceps, and Ray stared at nothing but that bedroom light – how could he turn it off without being obvious? But, perhaps sensing the unease in his stiff, trembling shoulders, she flicked the light so he didn’t have to. Then, for the first time in three years, he kissed a woman.
Soon after, naked under the covers, he plucked a bolt of lint from her belly button and she giggled. Kelly’s body disappeared beneath the blankets, her muscled legs only shadows against the curl of his palm. Ray caught a glimpse of himself, his pasty gut, his mangled hands on her stomach – how could she be genuinely interested in him? With this awareness went his boozy haze, and, with that, everything that mattered at a time like this. He focused on Kelly, the sound and sight of her, the way she shifted with his hand and tongue.
He thought of Tracey, followed the memory of curves and moans and the way she would sink her teeth in the soft of his ear. But Tracey was not the woman laid out beneath him; his memories did not match the curves, the sway of breasts. He imagined how Alex would’ve acted at a time like this, or how he would’ve acted with her thighs sticky against his jaw, those muscles that must reach like taut ropes toward her knees. Christ, she was a good-looking woman. His old body hovered above Kelly, spread along the length of her, limp. His lips grazed the coarse hairs between her legs but it didn’t matter, nothing was going to matter.
Ray rolled off her and sat on the edge of her bed. One of her legs touched his lumbar beneath the sheets. Amber light from a street lamp leaked through the tiny window; it blanketed his feet and lit his discarded pants. She shifted. The blankets rustled. He wouldn’t do this well with a woman ever again. His cock dangled against the bed. The sight of it made his cheeks hot, made his fists ball. Kelly fidgeted behind him. If only she would say something.
Then: a hand on his back, between the shoulder blades, warm in the winter cold. He imagined the contours on those fingers, the nicks and scars and the chewed nails and he felt a tingle, down there, but it lapsed as he noticed. He shivered and leaned away; her fingertips lingered on his spine.
A real man would save face, blame the booze, answer with bravado and nonchalance – but Ray had long moved beyond that. You get less and less invincible, he figured. Or you give up trying. Years ago he would have demanded a blowjob and passed out halfway through. Instead, he hooked his jeans with his big toe, slid them toward him, and tugged them on. Her hand disappeared. The denim balled at his kneecap.
—You can stay, if you want.
He did want. He wanted so bad to stay there in that bed, sexless and warm, snug against the tight muscles in her lumbar. He wanted to wake late with his face buried in her hair and watch her dress in the blaze of daylight, naked and his, even for just this once.
—I’m sorry. About this. It has nothing to do with you. So much depends on this night and I don’t know. I don’t know why.
He felt her shrug.
—So go to work on Monday and tell them everything they need to hear.
Something like relief passed through him, a great exhalation. Ray lay down with his arms at his sides and clutched the blankets. What was there for him to say? It felt like highschool, the first time he ever had sex, the winces and squinting eyes, cold sweat on the bedsheets. Kelly coiled around him. Her warmth spilled into his backside; the human body produces as much heat as a one-hundred-watt bulb. Ray let the night happen. She prodded his feet with her toenails and, later, laced her fingers through his. He didn’t flinch. He didn’t even shiver. All the problems could wait.