— This doesn’t seem like much of a bet, really. Why would you make this kind of a bet?
— Well, it goes like this. If what you stand to lose is everything, and what you can win is also everything-or, well, heaven-you have unlimited reasons to make the bet.
Veda lit the joint. She took a few hauls and handed it over to him. He toked and coughed and passed it back.
— I just don’t know if I’m convinced, said Pete. This coin toss. Anything about believing. My stepdad is a pastor and he and the people at his church have a whole lot of answers that work fine for them. But they never worked for me. It took me awhile to realize that. And you talk about just believing, well, I’m not convinced.
— Me neither. Like if God’s up there, how can everything in life be so shitty?
— I guess that’s assuming that you and me and everybody else should be happy all the time. If he’s up there, maybe that’s not what he even has in mind. Us being happy all the time.
— If.
— Yep.
— We’re about half an hour away, said Veda. This is country I know. It’s been awhile since I saw it but I know it. Anyway it’s hot as hell. I want to go swimming first. Come on, I’ll show you a good place up here. But you got to be man enough.
— Man enough. What do you mean?
— You’ll see.
She told him to turn off the highway onto a side road. Scarcely more than a gravel trail through the bush. The side road tapered past a few properties and went on for awhile and came finally to a dead end at a railbed.
They got out of the car. Pete stretched. When he turned around he saw she was removing her shorts and her T-shirt. She was wearing a swimsuit underneath. She caught him looking. All she said was: Summertime in this country-it’s a day wasted if you don’t swim, you know?
The Adidas shorts he was wearing would do as a swimsuit. He hesitated for a moment and then took off his own T-shirt and tossed it onto the driver’s seat. The sun was hot on his shoulders and the back of his neck.
She led him down the tracks, telling him it was an abandoned line. As they walked, she brought out another skinny joint and they smoked it. A sign standing to the side of the railbed exclaimed No TRESPASSING in letters partly obscured by rust. They rounded a final bend and the bush receded on slabs of exposed bedrock. Up ahead was a wide blue creek and spanning the water was the bulk of an old train trestle. The girders were gaunt, all browns and blacks. It had to be forty feet from the girder framing the top of the trestle to the surface of the water.
— That thing? said Pete.
— You bet. Best view in the world up there.
Pete looked into the river below. The water was the same breathless monochrome as the sky. But where it flowed under the trestle, the water was shadowed in depths of green-black. He watched as a long walleye arrowed lazily into the shade. It lingered and then it darted away. Pete felt reluctant to look at the trestle itself.
— Well?
— What do you do, you just climb it?
— Right up the side. All us kids have been climbing that thing as long as I remember. I might have been eight years old first time I jumped off.
— You’re fucking crazy.
— Oh … I wondered if you’d be man enough.
— I’m not sure why you think this has to be a test of whether I’m man enough.
— But isn’t that how it works for men? Physical challenges and all that?
— So they tell me.
She was ambling over to the angled upright. She stepped out of her tennis shoes.
— Anyways, good fortune comes to those who prove themselves.
— What is that supposed to mean?
But she’d already begun climbing. She moved like a spider, hands gripping the wings of the I-beam, toes curling on the rounded bolt-heads. She scaled the upright and moved fluidly over the triangular brace at the top.
Pete stepped across the concrete pad where the upright was anchored. He took off his sneakers and stashed his car keys in one of them. He grasped the sides of the girder. He could feel his sweat gelling against the rusty metal. He climbed. As long as he stared directly ahead, he was okay. But looking left or right, to where the 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. I want to have you, I want you to be mine. I’m not any good at being possessed. But I’m not any good on giving up on men either. They all just interest me too much. That’s my problem. The possessing thing, calling it love, that was his problem.
— So it was a boyfriend.
— 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.