The Reconstructionist Page 3

  There were slow days, and days spent reading maddeningly useless depositions, days spent working out some trivial but necessary and elusive problem of mathematics or physics, days spent trying to find a source for obscure information on decades-old frame rails or fuel tank designs, days spent travelling between obscure towns amid empty plains in order to take a few photos and measurements of dubious utility. But even these days held at least a possibility of discovering something of significance, of seeing a problem in a new way or coming upon some small, critical, overlooked evidence. Ellis liked the work. It reminded him of the books he enjoyed, stories of sharp-eyed detectives, stories of worlds a little separated from the usual one. At intervals he came across an accident-scene photograph – a bloodstain on the road, a tooth alone on a car seat, a body burned past recognising – that made him cold in his bones and reminded him of his reservations, and at these times it again seemed possible that this was the last job on earth that he should have. But this feeling came to him less often as time passed, as case files accumulated and accident-scene photographs overlaid one another and grew indistinct.

  Ellis discovered that Boggs didn’t generally keep friends – he could be too overbearing, too blunt, too indifferent, too silent. But somehow, because Ellis worked for him and because Boggs loved working, Ellis was largely shielded from these traits. Moreover, they were often seated side by side for long periods – in airports, airplanes, rental cars and hotel bars as they travelled to inspect accident scenes and vehicles – and the travel demands of the job curtailed other relationships even as the two of them were pushed together. They joked easily, and they could be silent easily. As years passed and Ellis came to understand the work and to participate in it with the efficiency of familiarity, they also began to go together to occasional baseball games, or pike fishing, or funny car races. They had a habit of long, desultory conversations called from desk to desk late in the office when everyone else had left. Sometimes these seemed to Ellis almost a dream of voices in the head.

  ‘One of the problems between my wife and me,’ Boggs said once, out of a long silence, startling Ellis, ‘is over kids. What do you think about kids?’

  ‘I don’t know. They’re pretty cute. I guess sometimes I get tired of their noise on airplanes.’

  They were in the middle of the inspection of an exemplar Silverado, an undamaged pickup of make, model, year and option package identical to that of another pickup which had been struck head-on and burst into flames when a drunk drifted across the double yellow line. They would use measurements from the exemplar for comparison purposes. Boggs stood on a ladder, above the hood, shooting photos downward while Ellis held a measuring tape against the vehicle one way, then another. They were interested in the precise curve of the bumper. Boggs called, ‘I really don’t like them when they’re little. Like village idiots. You can’t have a real conversation.’

  ‘They’re cute, though.’

  ‘Cute, but they don’t even know how to wipe themselves. Who wants to spend day after day hanging out with a room-mate who can’t wipe his own butt?’

  ‘Someone did it for you.’

  ‘Bless her, I have no idea why. Look at what Mom got out of it. A son who sent her a case of beer at Christmas.’

  ‘Mindless propagation of the species,’ Ellis said.

  ‘You’re being sarcastic, but you’re right.’

  ‘You’re being sarcastic.’

  ‘Nope.’ Boggs grinned, took another photo, then dropped the camera and let it hang on its cord around his neck. ‘The other thing is, I’m sure that any kid I have will die before I do. Hit by a bus, drowning in a pool, SIDS, finding a gun in the neighbour’s closet, leukaemia, drafted into some dick-swinging war, whatever. How could the kid possibly survive? Most do, somehow. But I’m stuck inside my own lizard brain, and whenever I think about having some idiot kid, I get these chills. Dead kid. It would be horrible. I would go to the nearest steel foundry and jump into a batch of molten iron.’

  Ellis looked up at him and said nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Boggs frowned. ‘I wasn’t thinking of your brother. I hadn’t made the connection. I’m the idiot.’

  ‘My dad’s life did go pretty much straight to hell after that,’ Ellis said. Trying to give nothing away. He already knew Boggs’s position on the topic of children, through Heather, because he was conducting an affair with her.

  ‘I don’t know what an accident is, really,’ Boggs said.

  This – or a version of this – represented one of Boggs’s themes. And after the third or fourth time, Ellis had developed a standard response: ‘Everything’s got a name, but not every name’s got a thing.’ Or a version of this.

  ‘Everything,’ Boggs would say, ‘depends on the contingent and the adventitious, and if the meeting of two vehicles in an intersection can be called an accident, then what can’t be called an accident? Where my footsteps fall, where I place my hands, where I sit, where I stand, how I appear in the world, who I speak to, the kind of work I do, who I befriend, who I fall in love with?’ Boggs pouted. ‘Accident?’

  Some of these conversations occurred in Boggs’s office, and Ellis had grown exquisitely familiar with the backside of the photograph of Heather that stood on Boggs’s desk – the black cardboard, the little rotating latches, the triangular folding stand, the stainless-steel frame edge. But if he came around the desk to point out something on Boggs’s computer screen, he wouldn’t let himself glance at the photo. Instead he closed his attention on the computer screen, sometimes examining it pixel by pixel. He had an attitude of awe before his yearning toward her. And anger, because that yearning appeared so irrational and futile.

  Every few weeks, despite himself, he went again to the art museum and wandered. He could not deny his hope, which amazed him. Sometimes he paced a slow circle around the spot where he’d encountered Heather before, looking, smelling the air, as if he might find some evidence of her, as if by detecting her in the past he might summon her into the present.

  And years passed. Then, on a late-spring afternoon when Boggs was across the continent, participating in a mock trial that a client had arranged, Ellis’s phone rang. Boggs, in a growly tone, said, ‘Do me a favour?’ Heather – he said – was stranded in her father’s RV in a grocery store parking lot. The engine wouldn’t start. ‘Do you know what it costs to get an RV that size towed?’ Boggs asked. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a bad connection at the battery.’

  Ellis went.

  The RV – a Coachmen Leprechaun, running a Ford V8 under the hood – lay at the edge of the parking lot, big and rectangular as a fallen megalith. The problem was just as Boggs had suggested. Ellis retrieved pliers and a wire brush from a hardware store down the street, cleaned the battery connections and tightened the leads, and the engine keyed on. Heather, in the driver’s seat, clapped. She climbed down and peered at the burbling engine. ‘All good,’ Ellis said.

  ‘Want some iced tea?’ she asked. ‘Want to come in?’ she added, in a satirical tone, gesturing at the RV’s fibreglass side door. She apologised several times for the mess before letting him enter.

  Marbles, toilet paper rolls, electrical wires in many colours, seashells, dryer lint, blackened sheets of aluminum foil, quartered tennis balls, Dixie cups, images of children cut from magazines, moulded plastic zoo animals – these were gathered in coffee cans and shoeboxes all over the floor. On the little dining table lay a large set of watercolours and an old anatomy textbook with holes drilled through and plastic flowers sprouting from it. She cleared a seat for him and poured iced tea in repurposed yogurt cups. He sat with anxiety bobbing inside. Beside her, loosely arranged on the bit of counter space beside the sink, stood a few strange objects. A pair of little alien creatures – assembled from pen caps, wires, pieces of cellphones, bits of shining broken glass for teeth – looked at themselves in dollhouse mirrors. A spiky ball had been built from cigarette butts and painted an unnaturally bright sun-yellow, making
it a pretty little object. And flooding from the double door of a plastic toy barn came a blob-like collection of pieces of things, arranged as if oozing into all directions. Looking closer, he saw that the blob-thing was made of many plastic soldiers, or pieces of plastic soldiers, assembled to present a surface of weaponry – pistols, rifles, bazookas, mortars, machine guns, aiming everywhere.

  Heather said, ‘Don’t touch!’ But then she reached with a finger and prodded it. ‘It’s too delicate. Some day I’ll hit a pothole and destroy it.’ She apologised once more for the clutter. ‘Dad doesn’t use the RV any more, so he lets me borrow it, and it’s kind of evolved into a storage unit.’

  As if conditioned by the photo on Boggs’s desk, he could look toward her only in fretful glances. ‘I should thank you,’ he said, ‘for helping me to meet Boggs, for the job.’

  ‘Should you? Do you like it?’

  ‘It’s always interesting. Every case is different.’

  She talked about her father’s love of his job, as a cop. Ellis picked a roll of tape from the table and tested the stickiness of its edges. He tapped with his foot a box of toothpaste-tube caps and matchbook covers.

  Into a silence he blurted, ‘That’s a lot of toothpaste caps.’

  ‘You can find the strangest things at garage sales. I once saw a shrunken head, set out on a blanket beside some cheap flower vases. A price was stickered onto the nose. Ten bucks, I think.’

  ‘It was real?’

  ‘I think so. I tried to buy it, but the woman decided she didn’t want to sell it after all. I offered fifty, and she started yelling at me.’

  ‘She lost her head?’

  Heather didn’t reply, and Ellis, in anxiety, glanced at her again. ‘It’s more like she kept her head,’ Heather said, ‘but decided that she’d gotten ahead of herself.’

  ‘Stuck her neck out?’

  Now she grinned. ‘Way out.’ She searched in a pile of construction paper. ‘I was just sort of experimenting with Popsicle sticks for Christmas tree ornaments.’ She held up a star shape, decorated with glued bits of coloured cellophane. ‘The trick is to remember to pretend that you have the clumsy hands of a child.’

  They sat quietly while she fussed with the cellophane.

  She said, ‘John’s glad to be working with you. He likes you.’

  ‘I like him, too.’

  ‘But don’t you wish sometimes that he’d just shut the hell up?’

  Ellis laughed. But she didn’t. She made a small adjustment to the position of the pitcher of iced tea. With a feeling of abandoning the shore he said, ‘It wasn’t a coincidence, exactly, when I ran into you at the art museum.’ He told her about seeing her at the airport, about driving by her house, about going week after week to the museum.

  ‘Why didn’t you say something in the airport?’

  ‘My mom wondered the same thing,’ he said. He was trying to joke, but she only picked up a bit of amber-coloured cellophane on the tip of her finger. ‘I was surprised.’ He looked at the oozing blob of tiny weapons. ‘I suppose I was scared.’

  She set the cellophane onto a star. Was she waiting for him to go on? He couldn’t go on. He ached and jittered with embarrassment, and then, looking at the aliens’ broken glass teeth, he thought of Boggs. Abruptly he stood and said goodbye, and he fled. He saw that she was surprised; he went too quickly to see if it became disappointment.

  For six weeks a pain seethed in his chest, as if his blood were attempting to flow in the wrong direction. Until, on an afternoon when Boggs had again left town, the phone rang, and Heather said she needed help moving a set of shelving she had bought.

  In great caution they didn’t meet very often. Sometimes he did not see her for three weeks, four weeks, and he grew anxious. Then despairing. The architecture of his life began to look like lunacy.

  Affair: the word astonished him every time it appeared in his mind. All he had done was rediscover and fall for a small, dark-haired, scarred, slow-smiling woman. That she happened to be married wasn’t a part of the equation. That she happened to be married seemed simply strange. That she happened to be married to his boss seemed strange to the point of unreality.

  Sometimes Heather said that things needed to change. On a couple of occasions, she grew angry. ‘We all need to grow the fuck up!’ she cried. ‘I’ll just tell him it’s time for a divorce. It’s not a big deal. A divorce.’ She sounded very grim. It made him fearful. He wished he weren’t, but he feared to sabotage Boggs, feared Boggs’s reaction, feared the loss of his job, feared the end of his present life. He wished it could be done in some way that would not hurt Boggs. But she spoke of soon, and when soon might be remained undefined. He had decided that if she asked him to give up his job and his friendship with Boggs, he would. But finally she didn’t ask, and he wondered, what did she fear?

  The covert nature of the relationship amplified, he saw, its excitement. The sense that they were getting away with something, that they should be ashamed, that no one else knew the potent emotions flowing between them, that they created and inhabited a hidden world. When their relationship became public, it would become something different. So, after he’d been working for Boggs for six years and having sex with Heather for two, he still could not say when the situation would change. Shouldn’t he want an ordinary life with her? He did. He did. And he had an obscure trust that it would come. And nothing changed.

  And what was wrong with her relationship with Boggs? She said only that her husband had closed away the essential parts of himself. Ellis could see that being married to the man would be a different thing than being friends with him. There had been entire days on the road when Boggs didn’t speak a single unnecessary word. And when they examined the result of some inexplicable driver action – a driver who attempted to pass in a blind curve, or run a red, or pushed a grocery cart full of concrete mix down the street with the front bumper of an IROC-Z – Boggs often displayed a daunting misanthropy. ‘The only thing that makes humans different from animals,’ he said, ‘is that humans can be creatively stupid.’

  One night, on a nearly empty highway, returning to civilisation from an accident location a couple hundred miles into the plains, Boggs had hung behind a semi-trailer for several miles and then, without a word, began edging nearer and nearer, until the front bumper of their rental was just two or three feet behind the trailer’s blunt steel framework. At 75 mph, Ellis gazed in horror at the trailer’s glowing tail lights, close and large. When he glanced at Boggs, Boggs reached down and adjusted the volume of the radio. Ellis said, as gently as he could, ‘What are you doing?’

  Boggs backed away. He didn’t say anything.

  Ellis intended to bring it up sometime when Boggs seemed more calm. But it didn’t happen again, and nothing, really, had happened – there had been no collision, no physical evidence. It seemed almost as if he might have imagined the incident. And it was a tricky topic to raise with a man who was, after all, his boss.

  He met Heather in cars and motels and in the duplex where he lived, but most often in her father’s RV, in strip mall parking lots and highway rest stops. The RV’s little windows were always shut, the lemon-yellow curtains drawn, so nothing outside could be seen, and nothing outside could see in. Still, traffic always ran nearby making its ceaseless noise, rising to a roar when the semis passed, and Ellis could imagine the vehicles and their motion quite clearly. On the RV’s dining table lay Heather’s experiments for her classes, or some of her own work – an Elvis bust made from peppermint drops, small gold Christmas tree bulbs glued together into a crashing wave. She intermittently worked for weeks or months on these things, then they sat around for a while, until she threw them away. If Ellis suggested they could be displayed or sold, she scoffed.

  Nearer in memory, however, were the movements of Heather’s ribs as she breathed, the touch of her fingers on his skin, the minty odour of her shampoo and her own human scent. She called his penis Detroit; her crotch was Los Angeles. And she called it
the recreational vehicle in a tone that made it a double entendre. In memory, the RV meetings washed together warmly and settled into a few singular, wondrous impressions. She moved on top of him, and when he had come, she stilled him and held him inside her until he became hard again and she renewed her movements. He’d felt as if they might go on this way, the two of them, simply, lazily, forever.

  ‘Tell me something you don’t like,’ she’d said once, lolling beside him.

  ‘Moment.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just the word, moment.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It might mean a fraction of a second, or it might mean minutes, or days, or weeks. In a history book it might mean years. It’s totally imprecise. What’s worst are things like “a moment or two”, “a few moments”. I don’t know how anyone ever understands anyone else when we use words like that.’

  ‘You should let your inner dork out more often,’ she said. ‘It’s cute.’ She rolled over and grabbed his penis with both hands. ‘Just don’t get cocky about it.’

  ‘OK. OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s talk economics – I have a theory that Detroit is about to experience an urban renewal.’

  She asked, climbing onto him, ‘What if joking is a substitute for real communication?’

  ‘Detroit doesn’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said, ‘and Detroit doesn’t care.’

  Then, Heather’s father died. For years he had been in declining health, a decline that failed to halt his habit of burning and inhaling three or four packs of cigarettes a day. Ellis learned of the death in a brief phone call from Heather, and he ached that he couldn’t go to the funeral, couldn’t see her, couldn’t comfort her. She had not seemed especially close with her father, but he had been her only parent from the time she was four. When he did speak with her after the funeral, on the phone, she said that she was all right, more or less, that her father’s long illness had helped her to prepare for the end. But she was angry with Boggs; without consulting her, he had sold the RV.