surrounding landscape stretched away, he had flashes of acrophobia. It lit small fires in his fingers and toes. He was breathing hard. He came to the brace and made the final bodily twists onto the skyward face of the girder.
He lay airless on the sun-blanched metal. His feet stuck out over the edge behind him. The beam wasn’t two feet wide. To his right was a frightening drop to the ties and rails. To his left was an even longer fall to the river.
Pete raised his head. He was sweating into his eyes, clinging to the hard surface beneath him. Veda was fifteen feet farther down the beam and she was sitting. Pete crawled out to her.
— There you are. Sit up, will you?
Pete laboured into a sitting position and groped for the edges of the girder.
— I like it up here, said Veda. It’s so quiet. It’s a good place to get my head together.
— It’s alright as long as I don’t look around too much.
— Just enjoy the view.
— I’m trying.
— It’s a couple of years I’ve been gone. We used to come up here all the time.
— You were never afraid?
— Of heights? No. Never of heights. Heights were always, you know, whatever.
— Yeah. Just like that.
— I loved it in Montreal. God I loved it there, for what it was, for the time I was there. But it didn’t have any good quiet places like this. Like … I think most dudes say they love a girl but by love they mean have. You know. Possess. All those songs, right? All those poems.
— So it
— That sounds so cute. It’s more like how sometimes you know how it’s going to end up. Sometimes you want the pain of it. Right off from the beginning.
— He broke your heart and you skipped town?
— That’s way over-exaggerated, dude. I didn’t say I got my heart broken. But me and him, let’s say I just got my heart right tired out. And when that happens and the going is good, you know, you got to get a move-on.
— I think I know a thing or two about that.
— Don’t think it was all at once. I went east first. I was in Halifax for a couple months, working at a hotel. Then I got a job at Mont Tremblant. I was in Ottawa. But, like I said, I just got tired out. In my heart, if you can see what I mean at all. So I’m going home. I am flying the white flag. I got my hands up and I’m coming out. Don’t shoot, you bastards.
— It’s not your whole story, said Pete.
— It’s whole enough. How bad do you need the names?
— Good point.
They lolled quietly, letting the hard sunlight work on their skin. If he moved his hand to a new position the steel was almost too hot to touch. The hot metal made him think of the bitter cold floor inside the storage locker, how all the feeling had gone out of his hands and feet and ears. In Pete’s waking vision, the hammer was falling even now. He let one hand go from the edge of the girder and he looked at the rust lined into his flesh.
— My uncle is a killer. He killed a couple of men not so long ago. And a long time before that, he killed another guy, a guy who … Well, it doesn’t matter now. A guy who my uncle thought had it coming.
Veda was looking at him. Her hair was sweat-slicked across her temples and her shoulders were bright with the sun.
— Hey, man. Listen-
— I won’t talk about it if you don’t want to know.
— I didn’t say that.
He told her everything. He considered leaving out some details but he did not. He told her of his life and he told her of the months and weeks and last days leading up to the morning of the falling hammer. He told her of the time that followed. Barry who prayed, the boys who stared, his mother whose face became a barren thing, moonscape where two vacant eyes sat in deep craters. His grandmother who could not say anything at all, who just receded more and more into the rhythm the machine dictated for her. She lived longer than anyone thought she would. A measure of months. When she died, it was at night and none of them were present.
— And this guy, your uncle?
— He’s alive. Like, he shouldn’t be. But he is. It missed his spleen. The bullet. Missed his liver.
As he spoke, he held his hand up, flat, palm down. He moved the hand slowly in front of them. He had no idea what he was trying to communicate by the gesture. Something ballistic. He let the hand back down to grip the girder.
— He was in the hospital for a long time.
— And, what, did you see him?
— No, said Pete. I never did. Now he’s back in jail. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure him out. I can’t. I don’t know if I ever will. He’s a killer … But if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be alive. I wouldn’t be sitting up here talking to you. Those men would have broken a hole through the ice and sunk my body to the bottom, or God knows what they would have done. But that didn’t happen because of what my uncle did. Try telling me what that means.
She didn’t say anything. She just sat there for a little while, squinting her eyes and flexing her toes. He’d speculated there might be release in the telling, but there wasn’t. Maybe it would take some time to feel it but for now there was just the day and the heat and somewhere the knowledge of every day that had gone before.
— So, said Pete.
— You’re alright.
— What?
Veda put her hand on his face, on his nose. Traced with her fingers the crookedness of the bone.
— You’re an alright kind of guy.
— This is something you just thought of?
— Mm, maybe. Anyways, come on.
— You want to go?
— The jump is always the best part.
— Right.
She stood up.
— There’s things we’ve got to get to, Pete. Things waiting for us. And today the getting is good.
She jumped off the edge of the beam. She fell soundlessly and crashed through the surface of the river. There was a brief time that she was out of sight, Pete watching for her, and then she surfaced. She kicked out a ways and turned on her back in the water and waved to him. She called his name.
After a short time, he climbed slowly and deliberately to his feet. He was giddy with the height. The view was vast and lonesome. He drew breath from the hot air and he saw in the southwest where rain clouds were gathering slowly, towers of cumulus piled to the sun, old as anything.
Pete bent forward. There was a last moment of contact with the hot steel and then there was nothing but gravity. He looked down, and just before he hit the surface of the river, he saw himself, a fast-moving shadow, rushing up feet-first to meet him.
