The reclaimed boards piled against the nearby wall are sun-silvered and scribbled with the marks and checks of age, and Liam remembers pulling them from the old barn at his great-aunt Temple’s farm outside of Estevan, Saskatchewan, where he spent a summer as a boy. Temple and her partner had no offspring, so Liam inherited their worthless land after they died. Because he couldn’t sell it and he isn’t the farming type, Liam has been pulling its structures apart over the years, board by board: the house and its miles and miles of fences, which were all rebuilt in 1935 after a cyclone razed the property during the Dust Bowl. Liam will invoice the owner of this house—a distant descendant of the Rockefellers—twenty grand for such premium material, and the guy won’t bat an eye.
Except Liam won’t be billing anyone if he doesn’t get himself fixed up and finish the job. Mercifully, the burning in his tailbone is gone and much of the fog from hitting his head has cleared, though his legs are still unresponsive. But he takes the prickling sensation in his hamstrings as a sign that the damage isn’t permanent. Probably a cracked tailbone or at worst a broken pelvis that’s pinching nerves—two injuries he’s witnessed other guys suffer on the job.
He rests on his back for a moment and tries to assemble a plan. The radiant heat that would normally warm the concrete floor has been set to a minimal temperature for the off-season. And this house sits upon a fifty-acre headland of oceanfront property, perched on a cliff that’s three miles from the main road, so the mail is likely delivered to a rural box somewhere. Which all means that nobody will be turning up here to save him anytime soon—probably not until spring. Liam lifts his head again to examine the room, and the large heap of off-cuts jumbled next to his DeWalt mitre saw tugs at his memory: Alvarez wasn’t looking well today, his eyes livid with wormy pink veins. All his cuts were off by a good eighth of an inch, sometimes more. He was wasting good wood—wood Liam drove to fucking Saskatchewan to get—so he sent Alvarez to the van for the rest of the day.
Whenever Liam requires a carpenter’s helper, he places an ad in a free weekly and contacts the guy who sends him the most crudely written email. He hires drunks, ex-cons, addicts, headcases. Most last only a few weeks, until they get money in their pockets and disappear. This practice of charitable hiring is at least partially attributable to some hippie do-gooderness inherited from Willow—or from Temple, who once ran a kind of soup kitchen out of her farm. Sometimes he wonders if it’s also his attempt to atone for his own wasted years. Whether he’s benefitting these hard-luck cases or simply offering them more money to destroy themselves with, Liam isn’t sure. But he prefers the company of those for whom life hasn’t been a cakewalk. They say more interesting things—and seldom comment upon the scorched mess he’s made of his own life.
Alvarez has been with him for six months and he’s a good worker. He’s a gambler, though. Does it on his phone, which is even worse than in a casino because it’s always with you, beckoning from your pocket. Some paydays Alvarez has already lost his week’s wages in the van before Liam drops him off at his mother’s house in Queens. Which means he’s in the van right now, waiting for Liam to finish work and drive him home. So all Liam needs to do is crawl out of the house and down the driveway to his van. Liam even has another phone in his glove box, a prepaid one that he uses whenever he goes to Canada. That settles it. While he fears that crawling could cause the burning to return and knows moving around could make his injury worse, he has no other choice.
Liam sucks in a ragged breath, flips himself onto his stomach, and slithers a few feet on his elbows, the claw of his titanium hammer—a gift from Meena during the early days of their relationship—screeching against the concrete, his steel-toe boots like barbells laced to his feet. Already breathing hard, he shucks the tool belt from his waist to ease his progress, and a few strings of brad nails spill out across the floor. He vows to pick them up once his legs come back, because no matter how sloppy his life has become, he’s always left his work sites immaculate.
Since the house is embedded in a low cliff that overlooks the Atlantic, the living room is sunken, so he’ll need to ascend two flights of shallow concrete stairs, a dozen steps in total. His arms are already weak from nailing reclaimed boards to the ceiling all day, so he barely climbs six steps before he’s sweating and gasping for water. The pipes will surely be dry, and if he ventures down into the basement to flip the water main he may never climb back out. Of course Liam has a few flats of Red Bull in his van. He drinks nine or ten daily because he despises black coffee and his stomach can’t digest lactose—Willow was the same, with her homemade soymilk and goat cheese crumbled over kale salads. The fact that Liam escaped five years of wanton drug use only to be left with an unquenchable thirst for these ridiculous caffeine-loaded sugar bombs seems half blessing and half curse, depending on the day. His old Narcotics Anonymous group was rife with such secondary addictions: most of them were pack-a-day smokers, or at the very least they drank coffee like air-traffic controllers. There was a tacit agreement among them that these lesser vices didn’t require kicking, because people like them would never really exist free of need.
Liam manages to climb the last six stairs on his elbows, and after much struggle he flops onto the front landing of the house. He rises onto one hand, arching his back, and strains for the handle before dragging the heavy plate glass door open. The late fall air is frosty, almost viscous, and it’s later than he thought, the frail sun sinking below a tidy congregation of rare elm and magnolia that some top-dollar arborist planted around the house.
He drags himself out along the brick path, his bare elbows digging into the freezing pavement. When he reaches the rust-coloured octagonal paving stones of the driveway proper, he can see his white contractor’s van parked about a hundred yards in the distance, near the maintenance shed. Liam calls out for Alvarez but none of the van’s doors come open. Maybe he’s sleeping. Or, more likely, gambling on his phone with his headphones in.
The sight of how much farther he needs to crawl with only his arms to propel him forces Liam to lay his face on the cold ground for a moment in despair. In his spent shoulders and buzzing spine, the years of toil, labour, and hard living are finally settling upon him. He’s never been so exhausted in his life. While he rests, he senses a curious wetness in his pants—a ticklish trickle. He spins onto his back, reaches down, and slips a juddering hand under his tool belt, behind the fly of his Carhartts, and his fingers emerge slick, pungent with the sour reek of urine. He hasn’t wet himself since his days of chasing a dozen oxycodone with an eight-pack of Lucky Lager.
He needs to keep moving or else he’ll start remembering again, so he flips back over and continues his excruciating commando crawl through the half-frozen leaf mulch. He’s always treated his past like an enormous trailer that he’s towing behind him, one that will overrun and crush him if he ever dares come to a stop. But even though he’s crawling as fast as he can, he can feel his mind begin to sputter and slow, and soon he has no other choice but to get run over.
JOURNEYMAN
WHEN LIAM TURNS sixteen, Willow treats him to a rare dinner at an actual restaurant. “It’s time we get serious about your career plans,” she says, while he regards her skeptically over the steak he’s ordered just to disgust her. “You don’t want me dragging you around forever, do you?”