The Reconstructionist Read online

  ‘I don’t really have any insight –’

  ‘He often hides what’s in his heart. But there was a connection between you, wasn’t there?’

  Ellis shook his head.

  She stood and made little fluttering gestures. She said, ‘Should I give up hope?’

  Ellis didn’t dare say a thing.

  ‘Shouldn’t I?’ she said. ‘But if I could, wouldn’t I have years ago?’

  ‘Maybe a little time apart from him will help,’ Ellis said, then regretted having said it. For a time he watched her as she paced. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘He’s old now, of course,’ she said, ‘but he was a good-looking young man.’ She retrieved a photo from the clutter on a shelf. ‘That’s him with his brother,’ she said. ‘His brother died several years ago of a stroke, unfortunately.’ Two young men, probably in their twenties, stood holding each other around the shoulders and lifting champagne glasses, wearing matching black suits and ties, one with a moustache and the other O-ing his mouth as if singing. Either one could have been a plausible younger version of James Dell. Ellis hazarded, ‘He’s the one singing?’

  Mrs Dell sat again in her rocking chair and gazed at the ceiling. ‘He hated singing.’

  Ellis wasn’t sure how that answered the question. He didn’t ask. It seemed he might only, somehow, grow even more confused, and he didn’t know if he could bear that. At the top of the window he saw a long series of coal cars creeping silently by on the railway embankment.

  When he stood, she stood, and he stepped forward and awkwardly accepted her embrace. Returning to the minivan he saw, under the blue spruce, two pans of standing beer. He stopped at a gas station, then steered for the interstate. The sun made a white smear in a silver-grey sky. He passed over a stretch of roadway dark and shining with wet, but he saw no rain. The exit ramp lifted the minivan upward as if to launch it into the sky. He would see his father.

  Because until now he had avoided it, he went first to the old house. The white siding had been replaced with pale blue and – absurdly, he thought – a wagon wheel and ox yoke had been nailed to the wall on either side of the front door for decorative effect. The TV antenna that he had climbed no longer existed. Grass, shaggy and weedy, had replaced the concrete lawn. A pair of maples he had never seen before reached up twenty-five feet or more. The driveway lay empty, and he could see nothing in the windows. Strange to think of strangers living here, but his family hadn’t been the first to live here, either.

  He stood out of the minivan, crouched on the kerb, put a hand in the lawn. Surely, he thought, remnants remained here – paint under the paint, holes patched in the drywall, scratches in the floors, fragments of broken concrete buried in the lawn – by which a former life could be reconstructed. As he crouched with his hand pressed to the grass, watching the house, it seemed his parents might walk out, or Heather, or Christopher, or himself, now, or now, or now.

  He stood and brushed the clinging grass from his hand and saw that the impress of the grass remained in the skin. He walked to the park, which lay nearer than it seemed in his memory. The swings had been taken out and unmarked turf lay where the scalloped places under them had been. In the intersection moved traffic. Blue pickup. Silver coupé. Yellow school bus. A green convertible – not Boggs’s.

  As he walked back to the house no one was around, except in the vehicles on the road, and he felt as if moving on foot made him strange and atavistic. From the minivan he watched the house a while longer, then turned the ignition.

  His father’s house lay a dozen miles to the west, and Ellis drove slowly that way, following first along a river, then down a long straight two-lane interrupted now and again by stop signs at the intersections of narrow dirt roads spanning off to perhaps a house, a farmer’s field access, a fishing pond, a patch of private hunting preserve. After a signpost indicating the county line, the roadway became an assemblage of patched cracks and potholes that set the minivan’s panels and joints rattling in bright percussion and the steering wheel shaking in his hands. Weeds flourished to the edge of the asphalt and infiltrated its cracks. He passed ragged houses with missing roof shingles, listing into their foundations, wood trim rotting, lawns decorated with tyres and broken concrete. In front of one house a tall woman with a sledgehammer laboured to destroy something on the ground.

  He turned onto a dirt-and-gravel road that rolled below the van more smoothly than had the patched asphalt. On either side lay open fields, but the road was lined with oaks and maples that reached over the road so that he seemed to be passing down an arbour. Dust pulled up off the road accumulated on the rear window in a brown fungous pattern. Tunnelling under glinting leaves with the tyres murmuring on the gravel, he felt he would be content to drive on and on and on this way and never arrive.

  He slowed approaching the driveway, wallowed up to it, turned in.

  The solitary object of any size on the horizon was the house, a two-storey clapboard farmhouse, grey neglect gripping its edges. When he stopped at the end of the drive he saw behind the house a long, metal-roofed shed and, on open ground a little further away, a solitary white toilet. Past the toilet lay only open field, ploughed into parallel furrows and abandoned to low weeds. In the distance ran a trace of fence and low green brush along it, demarcating the next field. The land fell gradually toward the line of the fence and rose again on the other side. Where the land appeared to stop, the sky began with a ridge of clouds the colour of used motor oil.

  He stood out of the minivan and kicked through untended grass to the front porch – a pair of naked two-by-fours held up one corner of the porch roof, and missing posts gap-toothed the surrounding rail. Here and there on the floorboards stood empty beer bottles, a sprawling water-damaged phone book, a half of a Clorox bottle filled with rusting nails.

  When he put his fist to the door, no one answered. His minivan was the only vehicle in the driveway. He sat on the porch steps to wait.

  He destroyed without energy or malice the first half-dozen mosquitoes that came to him, then gave up and let them have what they wanted. Gnats swarmed in clouds over the grass. He closed his eyes, rested his head on his arms.

  He woke with a jerk as a long Oldsmobile drew up. It parked behind the minivan, and his father emerged: his father with a paunch, shoulders fallen, bagged under the eyes, hair receded and feral, but unmistakably his father, with his father’s large hands and his high cheekbones grown even more prominent, the staring dark eyes a little watery. He wore a button-down shirt of startling white. He crossed half the distance from the car, stopped in the grass, and said, ‘Is that you?’ He raised a hand and pointed at Ellis, as if to clarify.

  Ellis felt confused by the question which, in its literal sense, seemed to allow no negative answer. He stood and opened his hands. He said, ‘I need to see the car, Dad.’

  His father came forward with a tight smile, staring. Small sharp wrinkles rayed from under the lobes of his ears. His arms, above the big hands, were thinner than Ellis remembered. ‘Boy,’ he said. ‘A surprise.’ He twitched and stepped back and looked around the yard. He laughed. ‘Let me get you a beer.’

  His father let him in and passed into the kitchen while Ellis waited in a dark living room where, as his eyes adjusted, the furnishings materialised slowly and silently in their places. Heavy curtains were pulled, but a vertical slat of light penetrated and illuminated spiralling dust. An unnerving sense of familiarity seized and held him for some seconds before he understood that these furnishings, although in a new context and new arrangement, were known to him: he had grown up with these chairs, these end tables, this sofa, this coffee table, this bookshelf, this wall mirror with the thick carved frame, its silver now spotting and browning, holding a distorted version of himself – his aged self examining a mirror where his younger self had once examined his younger self.

  The sofa and chairs, all in their original upholstery, were dirty, sagging, blackened along the front edges of the cushions and arms. Scrat
ches and stains marked the coffee table. One of the shelves of the low bookcase had been replaced with a plank of particle board that sagged alarmingly under a pair of pickle jars filled with coins.

  His father gave him a bottle of beer and Ellis said, ‘You’ve kept everything.’

  His father glanced around. ‘It’s a little old, I guess, but nothing wrong with it.’ As if to demonstrate functionality, he sat in one of the armchairs.

  ‘Have you seen a tall bearded man here?’ Ellis asked – the same question that he had put to any number of cashiers and clerks, and asking it again seemed to frame him once more into that long pursuit. As if Boggs had arranged things so that he would be pursuing him all the rest of his life. ‘Have you?’ he asked.

  ‘My son died in that car,’ his father said.

  Ellis shook his head. ‘He didn’t die in that car. He climbed out and got himself burned and died in the street. And you had two sons. You might say, “One of my sons died.”’

  ‘Tell me something,’ his father said, staring. ‘Of your life.’

  ‘Tell me about the big bearded guy. I know he was here. I know he looked at the car.’

  His father didn’t answer.

  Ellis looked at the furniture again and hated it, hated the mindless, numb inertia that kept it here. ‘Did he tell you who his wife was?’

  ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘I need to see the car.’

  ‘Why?’

  Ellis stood over the coffee table and vaguely tried to recall which of its nicks and scratches had been there when he last saw it. ‘That’s a reasonable question, but it would require a lot of background, and it doesn’t really matter. I have a suspicion. That’s what it amounts to.’

  ‘You mean, to explain you’d have to tell me something about your life.’

  He reluctantly met his father’s gaze. The pouches below his father’s eyes sagged as if they stored coins.

  ‘Well, your friend was here,’ his father said. ‘He talked for quite a while. Friendly guy. He did, in fact, tell me who he was married to. Had some interesting ideas about this and that. A little full of himself. I showed him the car. He wouldn’t tell me much about you, though.’

  ‘Can I look at the car?’

  A fly noised a circle somewhere overhead. His father shifted and drank. ‘I ran into someone who knew Heather’s dad the other day, at Pep Boys. I was buying lifters for my trunk lid. This guy said Heather’s husband is dead. Hit by a car. Is that true?’

  ‘It is. Can I look at the airlane?’

  When his father only stared, Ellis turned and went to the window and pulled the shade aside. He had to keep a grip on his anxiety and impatience. He felt he might begin to scream. But he sipped his beer.

  His father said vaguely, ‘It’s funny.’

  Ellis looked at him.

  ‘You can look at the car if you’ll do something for me. Two things.’

  Ellis waited.

  ‘Tell me something about yourself. And then listen while I tell you something.’ A meekness shaded his father’s stare.

  ‘All right,’ Ellis said. ‘Fine.’

  A quiet.

  ‘Tell you something?’

  ‘Please.’

  Without intention, Ellis sat. The feel of the chair under himself was familiar. ‘I hated my brother.’

  ‘You didn’t really hate him,’ his father said. He pulled at the sleeve of his strangely white shirt.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Christopher was in a bad position, between myself and his mother, sent back and forth, never allowed to settle and get comfortable with anyone or learn to trust anyone. Maybe he wasn’t your friend, but he was your brother. You looked up to him, you envied him, you wanted him to give more of himself to you than he did, and that angered you. But you didn’t hate him. If you think so, it’s an idea you’ve developed since then, and it’s my fault. I can see it’s my fault.’

  ‘You’re constructing fantasies and blaming yourself for them. I hated him because he was a jerk.’

  ‘I didn’t understand what I was doing to your relationship with him. I rarely understand what I’m doing, I guess.’

  ‘You have no idea how I felt, Dad.’ Ellis was angry with himself for allowing a conversation he had wanted to avoid. He looked at his father’s receded hair, tendrilling and floating a little up and down as he drank his beer. Was this truly his father? His father, certainly, but transformed by years, and so was this in any meaningful way the man that he had grown up with? ‘I’m living with Heather,’ he said. ‘I’ve been involved with her for some time, since before Boggs died. He killed himself. He stepped into moving highway traffic right in front of me.’

  ‘Ah,’ his father said.

  Ellis straightened and remembered straightening exactly this way in the same chair long ago.

  ‘I’ll tell you this,’ his father said. ‘I love you.’ He examined his shirtsleeve in silence. ‘But I realise I’ve never been able to properly manage that emotion.’ Silence. ‘You were easy to love and Christopher was hard to love, and maybe that was the problem – I overcompensated. I don’t know. Some years back, I had a girlfriend, a waitress with three kids. I liked her a lot, I was fond of her kids. One day she asked if I would pick up the youngest, a boy, from day care and drop him off at a friend’s where he would stay a couple more hours until she got off her shift at the restaurant. So I did. Picked up the boy, drove him to the friend’s house, nudged him in the door. I was backing out of the driveway when a woman came charging out of the house, yelling. Took me a while to figure out what had set her off. What it was was, I had brought the wrong kid. To look at him, it was perfectly obvious, and I knew the kid well enough, there was no excuse for it. So I took this boy back to the day care, where everybody had been going bonkers – police, a fire truck, my waitress girlfriend and other people, all running around, yelling at each other. My girlfriend’s boy, feeling guilty that he’d missed his ride, had hidden in a closet, under a pile of blankets, and it took a while to find him. And the parents of the boy I had taken were screaming at anyone who stood still to listen. They let me have it. My girlfriend was practically having seizures. A mess. I apologised of course, but that was it, I never saw her again. I thought about it a lot, and I realised that I just never learned how to do anything properly. I can’t even see things properly. I miss the obvious. It’s sabotaged my life.’

  Ellis waited. When he moved his foot a board creaked and it sounded explosive. He felt sad and heavy and weary and impatient and indifferent – he had heard from his father a number of similar stories with the same conclusion, and nothing ever came of it, no change of temperament or behaviour. The most surprising part of this one was that his father had managed to find a girlfriend, if only briefly. In the kitchen the compressor in the refrigerator kicked on and whirred. His father finished his beer, stared at him for a full minute, then stood and led him outside and around the house to the shed where he turned a key in the lock and slid the door aside. It moved with a sound of corroded steel bearings and revealed a space filled high and wall to wall with dusty and haphazardly stacked objects, many of them familiar – the brass coat rack, the child-sized desk, the crate of board games, the lamp made out of driftwood, the iron headboard, the steamer trunk painted green. His father heaved out two full garbage bags and revealed the hood of the airlane, standing at the centre of the clutter like an icon in a shrine.

  The two of them stepped over a box of slot-car tracks and squeezed past a cupboard that Ellis recognised from the old kitchen. Leaning into the trunk of the airlane, his father grunting through his nose, they pushed it into the daylight. The damaged chassis caused it to move on an arc to the right, so that when they stopped it pointed toward the toilet standing at the verge of the open fields, and Ellis realised that the toilet, too, he knew. ‘You took the toilet.’

  ‘The bank got the house,’ his father said, ‘so I took out everything. Took the hot-water tank. Would have taken the furnace, but it wouldn’t
fit through the doorway, and I didn’t have time to rip out the door frame.’

  ‘You have our old hot-water tank?’

  ‘Started leaking a while back. It’s in the shed there somewhere. Might be useful some day.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Could need a part out of it.’

  ‘Why is the toilet out there?’

  ‘Weather won’t hurt a toilet. Ceramic. Washes right off.’

  ‘You’ve lost your mind,’ Ellis said, and his father smiled.

  Dust on the car’s upper surfaces had been disturbed here and there by the brushing and pressing of hands – presumably from Boggs’s visit. Wires spilled from the broken headlamp openings. The wheels were overtaken by rust, and the tyres were flat and cracked. Looking at the damage across the front he could see already that the estimate of the angle of impact that he had used in the PC-Crash simulation had been off by a few degrees, although it seemed unlikely to make much difference. The airlane nameplate was missing from the left front fender.

  He retrieved a pen, notepad and three disposable cameras from the minivan, and he borrowed an old, worn retractable tape measure from his father; he could not recall if it was the same tape measure that they had had when he was a boy. He would have preferred to have several tape measures to provide measurements relative to one another, but his father only had the one. He found just inside the shed door a sack of wooden golf tees – he’d never known his father to play golf, but he didn’t ask – and used them to mark points in the grass around the car and measured straight lines between them.