even in the summertime

Driving to the job three abreast in the front of the van. “Painted Ladies” is on the radio. We pass a field of black cows mechanically chewing cud and Mitch makes obnoxious smooching noises at them through the open window while he steers. His nose is ever scrunched up as if he’s permanently sniffing fertilizer. He told me chunks of cartilage had just dribbled out of his nostrils in the shower one morning.

“Look at those pretty girls,” he says.

“That’s good beef cattle,” I say.

“Angus!” yells Dennis, all six-feet and sixty years of him squished between us.

“Square ass on that one.” Winding him up, Mitch repeats some data he’s no doubt heard from Dennis: “A square animal is a meat animal.”

Where you’ve got an upper lip, Dennis has a moustache of steel wool. He squints and lifts the bill of his red baseball cap to sun his balding head while his remaining blond hairs blow out the back like tassels.

“Holsteins that go for sale after they’ve been milked dry,” he says. “Ninety-nine percent of ’em go into hamburger ’cause there’s more bone in ’em than there is beef. The squarer the ass, the better.”

“Dennis,” Mitch says, “enough about your sex life.”

“Would you quit!”

Cutting through town on Main Street now, we slow for the light and then stop beside the boarded-up diner on the corner. That quiets the talk while we wait for a green. The radio fades.

“Your stepdad’s spot,” Mitch says finally.

I nod without looking. “They’ve still got it up for sale.”

“The franchise up the road’ll inhale the location.”

“That man could befriend the Devil, but converse with the Lord,” says Dennis.

The light changes, and I think of my stepdad’s eyes, the meat of them yellow as morning piss. He’d raised me after my dad lit out, and kept raising me after my mom ran off to Alberta with Bev’s old man, our literal neighbour.

I brought a slim envelope along last time I visited. Already on bad red wine, he invited me to stay for dinner, and we ate steaks on the covered back porch while we watched the storm come on like in the good days, the dark clouds lording over the fields, the rain pulverizing the dirt outdoors—though there were none of Bev’s family cattle out there bedding down any longer. Afterward, he put on an old VHS tape of The Searchers, which he knew every word to. Then he told me he was going to take a nap before we cooked up those steaks. I didn’t know if he was joking or loaded, but once he started snoring, I left him curled up on the couch.

I drove off wondering how much time and labour he’d put in to earn that spread, that view. To be able to watch the stampeding rain without being stuck out in it. But it’s gone now, the house sold off for debt, the property plowed over. All returned to seed.

Dennis yawns, “What’re you boys doin’ for the long weekend?”

“I’m gonna get some coke and go to the casino,” says Mitch. “Payday’s lucky.”

“I’m headin’ to the lake with the family,” Dennis answers his own question. “How about you, Ward? First summer back, you must be ‘racin’ ’round.”

“Just trying to get a girl to go out on the town with me. No dice so far.”

“No dice?” he says incredulously. “Son, you already smell like red wine and pussy.”

“You never had much luck getting girls back to the house,” Mitch joshes.

“If she shoots me down,” I tell him, “I’ll give her your address.”

“Woman shoots you down, it’s probably because she already has it.”

“I’d kick your nose in, Mitchell, if there were any left to kick.”

Outside of town, we blow by another ranch. A little driveway beside it leads into the oilfields where the pumps are pulling up dinosaur blood that’s fermented in the earth for a hundred million years. The same blood that ran through the shaky veins of Bev’s car. 

Even after graduation, and for two lucky summers of concrete until the boss informed me I’d be surplus come autumn, Bev and I would park down that very driveway and listen to Meat Loaf once she got off her late shift at the diner. She’d had first dates with faster guys, but she could still turn me on easy as playing around with a thermostat. Half-naked and unashamed in her beige work uniform, she’d tie her long brown hair back and tease that we were siblings now. I remember that rose tattoo surfing her hip bone, the stars gleaming off an array of syringes on the dashboard as she mounted me, those foot-long sewing needles with which her mother repaired the cows after birth. You could smell the petroleum from the fields. We were young, and that was romance.

~

The van weaves down the dirt road. Occasional beams of sunlight cut through the ash trees and warm the path. We rock side to side in the cab while the tires negotiate the deeply potholed laneway leading to a farmhouse. Its back half has been ripped away. There’s a massive rectangular pit where it used to be. Dunk McLaughlin and Mike the Breath staked and poured the footings yesterday so they could pin out another job this morning. You can tell they did the footings because they’re unholy, though they claimed to be within a hair of plumb, square, and level. At the end of the day, Mitch would shrug it off.

“What’s the difference if they’re level?” he’d say. “We’ve got the world’s best wall crew!”

Mitch leaves the windows down, the doors open, the radio on for entertainment. He strips his light blue shirt from his body and hangs it on the side mirror. I buckle my tool pouch around my hips. The hammer swings from its silver loop like a sidearm.

I unload the scaffolding from the back of the van, leaning a twenty-footer against my shoulder. Its frayed edge grinds against my wiry forearm as I balance it and descend the tricky, crumbling sand, and then pile the scaffolding beside the cages of wall forms. These were dropped into the pit via boom last night by the boss himself. Over the hours, we’ll use them to outline the foundation-to-be. I rest the base of one form on the chalky top of the footing and kick it into place while Mitch mirrors it with another, working with me. I lace those two together with metal ties, which slice my knuckles, then latch each of them to their neighbour and hammer them to hold. I proceed in this fashion.

In Mitch’s case, I proceed also by asking, “If you had to put Mike down, how would you do it?”

“Just shoot him,” offers Dennis from across the pit.

“Shotgun or rifle?”

“Rifle. A three-hundred right in the heart, right in the head, it don’t matter. What’re you shakin’ yer head at? You’ve never had to destroy an animal, have you?”

I go, “We’re talking about a human. I thought you told me you’d never had to destroy a dog before.”

“Not a dog,” replies Dennis.

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I’ve had to shoot a llama, a calf, a sheep—”

“A llama?” I ask.

“The wolves got in with the sheep, scared the llama and it ran into the fence. Broke its leg. You can’t do anythin’ for ’em, eh. You can’t let it run ’round with three legs.”

“So you shot it in the face,” says Mitch.

“No, I shot it in the head. My son wanted to see what a shotgun slug would do. Then after that, he never wanted to see what a slug would do again.”

Mitch goes, “What looked better, the headless llama or the boxed sheep?”

“Oh, you’d have liked the headless llama. The eyeball was down here.”

Mitch insists, “No, I still like the boxed—”

“No, you wouldn’t like the boxed lamb!” Dennis tells him.

“He’s my favourite.”

“We had a deformed lamb born last winter,” Dennis enlightens me. “He was like a shoebox. The vet had to do a C-section. He pulls this thing out—no head, no legs, just a hole to breathe, and he goes, ‘Don’t worry, it’ll die in a minute.’ Half an hour goes by, its little nostril is still doin’ this.” He constricts and releases his fist a few times. “But newborns, even if they’re gonna die, take forever to die. The will to live is way stronger in animals than in humans.”

“We think too much about it,” I say. “Did it have a brain in there somewhere?”

“I wish I saw that thing so bad,” mumbles Mitch.

“No, you don’t,” says Dennis. “It was just a big blob.”

“You gotta sketch it one day.”

Like the merciful will of God, “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” comes on the van radio to drown them out.      

I remember dancing one evening at a beachside barbeque that last summer, diamonds of sweat on her upper lip and suspiciously sober. Bev joked that this could’ve been our song. Then she said it could be ours: that morning’s piss test had shown two pink lines, and had I worn a safe? I only recall confessing that I had doubts, that neither of us had a proper model, that we might mould a disaster. Later, in the pit of the night, I came to, still drunk and puking on the shoreline, wondering if I could lay any claim after all.

I go, “What’s your favourite song, Dennis?”

“Don’t have one.”

“Not big into music?”

“I like music.”

“Well, like what?”

“All music.”

Hours of this, until we’ve got the walls formed, though they’re hollow. Lumbered with two pails of brackets from the van, I march back into the pit. I mount the brackets along the interior face and then lay the scaffolding across them, something to stand on at half-height later, when we guide the wet cement inside. It will be literal tons of concrete pushing against the one wall that’s now covering the rear of the farmhouse. We’ll have to barricade it with two-by-fours and two-by-sixes and then brace them with rebar stakes, drilled into the ground.

I grab and start the small chainsaw to shave quick angles into the ends of a few braces so they’ll go flush against the ground and walls. The exhaust nearly smokes me out of the hole, and the smell reminds me of my stepdad’s crappy outboard motor. I wish to sweep away the smell and time by zooming out on that fresh lake—the same lake we spread his ashes on like fish food—scooping bait from the minnow pail, hauling in perch until the stringer is as an anchor off the red tin boat. He would offer me beer from his cooler all day and get offended at my ungratefulness if I declined: No beer? You sure I can’t get ya anything else now? Pop? Water? Swift kick in the bag with a frozen boot?

From the van, Dennis yells furiously, “We got the maggot gear! The good drill must be in the other van. Drained batteries, no extension cord… I am gonna put Mike down!”

The old guy who owns the farm, whose job this is, comes to the edge of the pit and looks down at me and Mitch. He says, “Are ya winnin’?”

“Undefeated,” Mitch tells him.

Dennis strolls over.

“You got a farm, too, right?” the old guy asks him. “You got a cat you could give me? A weasel got in, killed nineteen chickens. Ripped their heads off, sucked the blood!”

“I had one last year,” says Dennis.

“A weasel or a mink?”

“A weasel.”

“Not a mink?”

“No, a weasel. I know a weasel.”

“Didn’t get yer chickens?”

“No, I had a cat. You gotta get a cat, it’ll take care of it.”

“Well, I had one! Weasel killed it, too!”

“A weasel couldn’t kill a cat. Mine used to bring ’em to the front door,” said Dennis.

“They got along okay?” asked the old guy.

“No, the cat killed ’em!”

“A mink?”

“A weasel!”

I close the van’s backdoor. Mitch unrolls his clean shirt over his shoulders and then drives us into town for lunch. Even the breeze is heavy and humid as he asks Dennis, “Can you give me four or five cigarettes ’til the end of the day? I’ll buy you a pack.”

“Why don’t you just keep havin’ one,” Dennis tells him.

We stop at a pizza chain where Angie’s Restaurant used to be. They sold the best Greek salads in town. Mitch orders a slice and a Coke. Dennis orders one, too, but with a diet soda.

At this, Mitch goes, “I’m ashamed to be your son.”

“You ain’t!” Dennis shouts.

“What?” says Mitch, feigning panic.

The server laughs as she gets me a slice and a root beer. I look down at the cement dust on my jeans, the sweat like coffee rings on my dirty T-shirt, and I remember Bev’s grey eyes fighting back angry tears before I left. I think of the three hacked up years I spent unshared, plowing snow for Riboux on endless northern roads, shielded from heartbreak at least, and earning. The boredom multiplied my vices. All I did was drink warm whiskey, smoke harsh dope, blare “Read ’Em and Weep,” and struggle to discern cowardice from desperation.

It took my stepdad two years to drink himself clear through to the other side once my mom left. I tell myself whatever happened would’ve happened sooner if he’d never known her at all. But it got him this past winter in the end. He’d forget our phone calls, where I was working, plans for Christmas, which I chalked up to lack of interest or the booze finally washing away his frontal lobe. When I heard he’d gone to the hospital, I called up, but he told me not to visit. Said there was no need. He spoke of work to be done, of beans to grind, of greasing the hitch on the boat trailer, slurring words like he’d had a stroke.

“I’m jus’ chewing’um,” he mumbled in explanation.

But he wasn’t. His kidneys had already calfed, I didn’t know. I told him foolish things like “get better,” “see you soon,” “we’ll listen to music round the bonfire this summer.”

It was Bev who tracked me down by phone at a bar up north. By then, I’d heard that her and Mitch had shacked up in some act of hollow pageantry. She told me she’d been sorry to hear the old man had done it, and I told her thanks for calling, because she was the only one who had. Then I walked out into the field under that winter sun, the tears hot in my eyes, and cursed my stepdad for being such a dumb bastard to die at fifty, twice my age at the time, as old as he was when I first met him. But people can’t do a thing except stay out of each other’s way, I suppose. We’re all just an audience to the eternal afflictions. So I went back inside and took one shot of whiskey in his name, like a bullet burning at the back of the throat. There were still roads to clear.

~

We have a smoke and eat our meals off the hood of the van. Unprompted, Dennis tells of how he met his wife at Beerfest twenty years ago. He didn’t have her home until two-thirty in the morning, he says. Her parents didn’t like that, their good Catholic girl.

“If I did end up looking exactly like you,” Mitch interrupts, “would you have a problem with it?”

“You need help.” Dennis replies.

“Dennis, come on.”

“Yeah, I would!” Dennis says. “It’s called stealin’ my identity!”

By the time we return to the job, the pink cement truck is idling behind the pumper and loudly churning gravel in its metal belly. The young guy driving the pump unfolds a metal arm by remote control. He’s wearing overalls and an oil-stained shirt. He flips a cigarette into one of the empty walls.

“Nice hard hat, you wimp,” Mitch greets him. “Hey, loan me a smoke.”

The pump guy obeys as he yells over the engine, “Let’s get this done, boys. Me and a buddy are headin’ up to Muskoka for the long weekend.”

“Just you and him?”

“No, we’re bringin’ our girlfriends. There’s no ass up there!”

While he and Mitch bullshit, I walk across the ladder from the ground to the wall, step down onto the scaffolding, and then drop inside. Dennis takes his time. He crawls over the ladder and squats at the top of the wall, then scoots to the edge and drops the last few feet.

I grab the circular saw and set to angling the tips of a four-by-four beam. The finishing brace, we’ll stake it to the ground and nail it to the centremost seam of the biggest wall. Dennis inhales a cigarette and watches me work.

“You’re probably the best wall stripper we ever had,” he estimates. “Could leave you alone to take down a huge wall all day, and you didn’t complain. You’d get lots done. And then this summer, you show up at the yard again, ready to work. Mostly that means endurin’ this degenerate, I guess.”

He shrugs toward Mitch, who’s humping the air dramatically in front of the pump driver. I can hardly make out his words. Something about tuning a woman in the laneway by the barn. I don’t say anything. I’m paid to build basements, not tear men down.

“Probably hasn’t kissed anyone on the mouth since him and Beverley got divorced,” Dennis mutters. “She wanted him to spend last Christmas with the boy, though. Said, ‘We ain’t doing anything for Christmas. We should get together.’”

“Wow,” I say, doing my best to disguise my disgust.

“Nobody wanted to be the one to break yer heart about her and him runnin’ ’round.”

“Well, I found out, Dennis.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “You know, Ward, they used to strap goggles on chickens to keep ’em from peckin’ each other to death. The lenses made everything look the same so they couldn’t spot a speck of blood, because if a chicken sees even a blotch, they’ll shred every damn thing, includin’ themselves. Could lose an entire flock if they got at it. So if you’re lookin’ through rose-coloured glasses, guess what? You’re chicken!”

He laughs to himself. Then his eyes scale the wall to review the wheatfield rising up beside it. Dennis says, “My tomatoes need some rain.”

“There’s supposed to be a storm on tonight.”

“Shit. I’m goin’ to the lake today. Forgot all about that.”

“Work all day in the sun,” I say. “I don’t want to go to the beach.”

“Water’s nice and cool, though,” he replies.
“You’ve got to get out eventually.”

Suddenly, Mitch leaps into the pit. “You boys got no jam!” he declares.

~

The pump guy fixes an extension sleeve to the metal arm and uses his control board to aim the soft hose inside the wall.

“You couldn’t push a dick in a woman!” he informs Dennis, who stands on the scaffolding and directs the wet concrete with a shovel to the bottoms of the forms and especially into the corners. Below him, Mitch and I scramble under and between the thick braces up against the base of the wall, hammering along the seams and latches to encourage the cement to fill even the tiniest crevices. As the wall is loaded with weight, several supports begin to squeak and shiver and threaten to blow out.

“Call out if anything breaks!” yells Mitch over the crushing noise of the concrete and the continuous revving of the pump truck.

Dennis looks down at him, then shouts, “Where’s yer shirt, you pervert? It’s not the Seventies, Mitch. There’s labour laws now. You ain’t been caught, but it’s gonna happen sooner or later. We’re supposed to have hard hats on, too!”

“What’s gonna fall on a basement guy? There’s nothing above us yet!”

Dennis starts a list: “A form, a cage, a corner, a two-by-four—”

At that moment, an unused form, nudged out by a trembling brace or by fate, falls from its holding cage and carves a twenty-foot angle downward through the hot air.

“Heads up!” I shout.

Ignorant and annoyed, Mitch turns to me. The corner of the form strikes him on the shoulder, scratches his chest, and then lodges in the dirt before his steel-toed boots. A thin slice of blood bubbles from his skin. The pump guy pauses the incoming load and we all look at Mitch. He’s humbled, but uninjured.

“You shit a little bit?” says Dennis. “Need me to drop you off at Bev’s?” 

“What the hell would you drop me off at Bev’s for?” Mitch says angrily. “We’re closer to my place.”

“You know. You know why.”

“Oh, whatever. I think Ward just tried to murder me.”

Afterward, the cement truck takes off early for the weekend while the pump driver rinses the sleeve with a garden hose. The old guy whose job this is comes over to inspect the product. The walls are full and their tops have been trowelled smooth. Plumb, square, and level. I suppose he’ll build something beautiful upon our ugly labour.

“How’d you make out?” he says.

“We’re still here and the wall’s still here,” Mitch says as he dons his pristine blue t-shirt. “It’s a good day.”

~

The van pokes weightless through a crossroads. It’s just after four-o’clock, but the sun’s still boiling like morning. Next week, we’ll revisit the basement, strip the forms from those solid walls, load up, and move on to whatever job Dunk McLaughlin and Mike the Breath set up earlier today. Their van is already back at the yard. For now, we clean ours out and toss the day’s trash in the burn barrel—empty cigarette packs, coffee cups, paper bags—and leave our pouches hanging on hooks in the van. The wind is now a cool relief.

I grab our paycheques from the plastic shelf mounted beside the punch-clock in the garage and snag a string of four light beers from the fridge. I divide the cans and the appropriate cheques between the three of us. Dennis tears the bottom off his and eyes the envelope’s contents.

“I’m goin’ to the lake,” he reminds us.

“Hell, gentlemen, let’s all of us go,” says Mitch.

“Just stay at the other end, you hooligans. I’m takin’ my grandkids.”

“Do you still swim, Ward?”

“I don’t have any trunks.” I chug my beer, then unsheathe and greedily crack the extra can, flicking foam from my fingers.

“What’s the diff? You don’t go commando, do you?”

“I’ll have to meet you guys there.”

“The usual bullshit,” Mitch sighs. “See you Monday.”

“See you Tuesday,” says Dennis. He volunteers to drop Mitch off on his way home.

The beaded seat in my car is covered in work dust, but it beats the sticky plastic of the plow truck, and the wind clears it out some as I drive. The engine light flashes orange all the way to the bank. It’s my turn to provide the booze, so I pop into the liquor store attached to the one-pump gas station next door for a bottle of Ontario white.

I stop at my trailer resting on a knuckle of land they let me carve out at the rear of my stepdad’s property, back by the cedars. In the shower, the soap mixes with the grit to wash away the scent of chalk, and the hot water unravels my achy muscles. I scrape off the day’s stubble, dry, and put on Levi’s and a green tennis shirt. I’m all cologned up. With my towel still damp, I go to the car and wipe down the beaded seat so I don’t dirty my jeans again, then spread the towel over the laundry basket.

Stuffing half my pay under my mattress in an envelope for the bank, I slip part of what remains into my wallet, and the leftovers I drop into a jar on the counter for gas and groceries. The brief glint from the shifting jar reminds me of the ring buried somewhere at the bottom, the ring I’d borrowed from my stepdad to afford at all and had only half-paid back, the ring I never offered her in the end.

~

They sold the farm not long after her dad took off to Alberta. Now, hers is a small place behind the hockey arena, where the high school kids still go at lunchtime to get the good french fries. The air smells like grease and newly cut grass. She’s working at the plant these days but gets awful bored on the shutdowns, especially with Mitch sucking up all the fun around town.

When I pull up behind her turquoise van, Bev is standing on the lawn and tossing chopped celery stalks to rabbits. They scamper off into the ravine as I slam the car door. Her brown hair is in a ponytail and her underbite is slight and she’s wearing one of Mitch’s old Thin Lizzy T-shirts loosely. She takes my hand and leads me to the screened-in porch again, where her calico cat is plopped on the floor. It rolls over to the edge of the porch and begins slurping up cobwebs until the meal looks like spilled milkshake in its whiskers.

“What a slug,” I tell her.

“I rescued him from the Society,” she says as we relax in lawn chairs. “Had a botfly in his neck when they found him, like cattle usually get. It’d sapped him down to his bones, poor thing. You could hold him like this.” She holds out her cupped palm. “But I do think he’s simple. Still follows me around like an obedient little puppy.”

“He knows you saved him.”

We pop the bottle of sweating wine and scorch a half-pack of cigarettes while the night heat seeps in and the streetlights come over uninvited. Dark clouds are rolling toward us.

“I love a thunderstorm,” Bev tells me.

I picture Dennis hip-deep in the lake, cursing what’s coming. Through the open window and in the other room, Meat Loaf is singing “For Crying Out Loud” on the stereo like a lullaby for Bev’s son, who’s out cold, I assume. Dressed in cut-off jean shorts, Bev plucks stray threads from her thighs. She is bony and she is strong, and she has seen many things.

“So did you decide,” she asks, “if you’re back for good or just for the summer?”

“For the summer at least,” I say.

“You used to say that about us every summer.”

“It was true then, too.”

“You’re a bastard,” she laughs, then sighs. “You know you didn’t have to leave, Ward,” she says. “Back then, I mean. Do you ever think about that, if you hadn’t left?”

I remember the revel and the fear of the magic we’d made, the promises spoken and revoked, those things that can never be said now. But I’d had little to offer at the time—a rented house that I shared with Mitch in town, a car that’d soaked up an entire salary in repairs and parking tickets, an income that rose and fell depending on the grace or plague of the season. To settle down, you’ve got to earn first, or else borrow. Something must be sacrificed.

“Be a different person if I’d stayed,” I tell her.

“Different person,” she repeats. “A different life.”

She smiles, but doesn’t say anything more about that. I watch her pretty toes draw lines in the green carpet and then watch her pave over the designs with her soles. She drains a clear plastic cup and refills it, but she just shakes her head. She lifts her baggy T-shirt to me. The rose tattoo below her left hip has faded slightly, and her fingernail imitates a scalpel along the      caesarian scar between a thistle and her navel.

“Look what that asshole did to me,” she says finally. “When I found out Mitch cheated, everyone tried to talk me out of keeping the kid. I guess your mom had one once, too, right? Though you wouldn’t have even known it.”

“You don’t want to end up like my mother, Beverley.”

“You are such a bastard,” she laughs again, her smiling teeth combing tight words.

“When’re you gonna let me take you out?”

She just sips her wine as she stares over the lawn, at the small streets and the houses. Her grin is distant, her eyes grey and still. She sucks her teeth briefly and then reaches out and rakes her bare nails softly down my tanned forearm.

“You remember that time we went to the drive-in over in Grand Bend? I wore those short boots and we saw Ladyhawke and you ate popcorn off my collarbone. You were so shy around my mom when you dropped me off. I think that’s the only real date we ever had.”

Then she goes quiet again, leans back, and straightens her shoulders to push her chest forward. Cheeks blushing, she stretches her pale calves. So, both of us lonely, I kiss her, strong but gentle. We fit together wisely, like it’s three summers ago even. You could see the cows from the porch then, their ears twitching and their heads slowly nodding up and down at sunset. We still wondered how things might turn out.

And sometimes it’s raining when I leave her place, and sometimes it’s morning. But it’s always too late to start over, even in the summertime.