The Neighbor's Wreckage

I moved into the back room of that workshop on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday I was already cursing the whole engineering department while hauling boxes off my truck.

Let me back up. My name is Philippe Roach, I'm sixty-four years old, and I'm a graduate student in structural engineering. Yes, sixty-four. Yes, a grad student. My wife died years back, I sold the house, and I decided I was going to finish the doctorate I'd put off for forty years. Sounds noble, right?

Well. The department had other ideas. My advisor retired, the new one wouldn't take me, and some tenured little squirt half my age told me, to my face, that "the program has a trajectory to think about." A trajectory! I've been doing load calculations since before that boy was born!

So there I was, in a rented back room in a concrete-block workshop in the industrial district by the water, because it was cheap and nobody bothered you. The room smelled like dust and old machine oil. Cracks in the slab. Someone had painted the wall green about thirty years ago and given up halfway up.

I was elbow-deep in a box of books when the first blow hit.

BANG.

The whole wall shook. Dust came off the ceiling joists. My coffee, my only coffee, the cup my late wife bought me in Portugal, walked itself right off the windowsill and shattered on the slab.

I stood there with a textbook in my hands and I swear my vision went red.

BANG. BANG. Again. Rhythmically. Like a heartbeat from hell.

What in God's name? I went to the window. Next door there was a yard, fenced in chain-link, and in it stood a man in a hard hat swinging a sledgehammer at a little condemned shed. He was enormous. Shoulders like a cargo container. And he was grinning.

He was grinning!

I didn't put my boots on properly, that's how angry I was. I marched out through the yard gate and across the gravel, and I yelled over the next swing.

"Excuse me! EXCUSE ME!"

He rested the hammer on his shoulder and turned around. Sixty-something, I'd guess, silver stubble, forearms like bridge cable. He regarded me like I was a stray dog that had wandered into his yard.

"Can I help you, professor?" he said. I don't know how he knew. Maybe the rumpled look. Maybe the air of grievance.

"You can stop demolishing that shed at seven in the morning, for a start! That wall we share? That's MY wall you're knocking off the back of my skull!"

"Shed's on my side of the fence," he said, cheerful as anything. "Condemned. Got the permit in my truck if you want to read it over a beer."

"A BEER?"

"Or coffee. You look like you dropped your coffee." He pointed at my shirt. There was, in fact, coffee on my shirt.

This man, this gigantic infuriating man, had already deduced my entire morning. I hated him instantly.

"I'm writing a thesis in that room," I told him. "A doctoral thesis. It requires quiet. It requires, at minimum, a functioning nervous system!"

"Name's Alec Fowler," he said, sticking out a hand as large as a dinner plate. "Retired demolition. Forty years knocking things down. And you'd be?"

"Philippe Roach. And I'm not shaking that, it's filthy."

He laughed. He actually laughed, big and easy, like I'd said something charming instead of rude. "Fair enough. Beer's in the cooler anyway. Come on, five minutes, then I'll switch to the far side of the shed and you can go back to your books."

I should have gone back inside. I would like to claim I went back inside.

I took the beer. Out of spite, mind you. It seemed like the most hostile thing available.

He popped his own and we stood there while he drank and I sipped, and he told me the shed was the last job he'd ever do for himself, "a send-off, you know, one last wreck before the hands give out." He said his doctor held views about his heart, which was exactly why he was doing this now, and I told him that was idiotic, and he said "probably" and grinned again.

"Structural engineering, eh?" he said, nodding at my shirt-stain and general disarray. "So you know why the shed falls the way it does?"

"Of course I do."

"Then tomorrow, come tell me why it fell wrong today. Leaned the wrong way. Been driving me nuts."

And that, God help me, was the hook. Because I looked at the shed, and the lean WAS wrong, the back wall had kicked out past plumb, and I started explaining it before I'd even decided to talk to him. He listened. Actually listened. Asked one question, a good one.

"See?" he said. "Beer helped."

I went back to my room with my heart rate still up and got four pages done, which was four more than the day before, so I couldn't even hate him honestly.

* * *

The next evening I was deep in Chapter Two, red pen in hand, when someone knocked on my door. Not the wall. The actual door.

It was Alec. No hard hat. Flannel shirt. Holding a bottle of whiskey like a trophy.

"Peace offering," he said. "And a question."

"It's eight in the evening."

"Exactly. Civilized hours. See? I'm learning." He held up the bottle. "Good stuff. My ex-wife bought it for me in, oh, must've been the year I got divorced, and I never had the heart to drink it alone."

"Your ex-wife bought you divorce whiskey?"

"She had a sense of humor. Best thing about the marriage, honestly." He leaned on the doorframe. "So. The question. You're what, sixty-something?"

"Sixty-four."

"I'm sixty-seven. And I bet you a drink that the old man, meaning me, finishes that shed teardown before you finish that chapter. Stamina, professor. You wouldn't believe the stamina."

"That is the stupidest bet I've ever heard."

"Is it? Because you're scowling like someone who wants to win something. My money says you've been losing arguments with that department all year and you're itching for one you can win."

I stared at him. The man had known me for twenty-four hours and had me dead to rights.

"The terms," I said, "are absurd. We're measuring different things."

"Chapter against a shed. Roughly a day's work each. Seems fair to me." He waggled the bottle. "Winner picks the next round of drinks. Loser admits, out loud, that the other is the tougher old bastard."

"And if I decline?"

"Then you drink the whiskey anyway, because it's rude to refuse a dead woman's joke, and we call it even." He looked past me at the room, the boxes still unpacked, the green wall, the crack in the slab. "Christ, they've got you in a bunker. This where they're making you write the great work?"

"It's quiet," I said. "Or it was."

"It was," he agreed, mournful as a funeral. "It truly was."

I stepped aside, because it was cold on the landing and because I wanted that whiskey, and I told myself those were the only reasons. He came in like a man entering a museum, nodded at my structural models stacked on the shelf, picked up a balsa truss and said, "This would've held."

"That's a teaching model. It's not meant to hold."

"Everything's meant to hold. That is the entire purpose of the trade. Things are meant to hold, and then somebody doesn't check the connections, and then boom." He set it down carefully. "Pour me a small one."

I found two glasses that weren't chipped and poured. He raised his.

"To the shed," he said. "May it fall loudly and teach us both something."

"And to trajectories," I said, and he looked at me sharp, like he'd heard the word before from somebody smaller and stupider, and he touched my glass with his.

We sat on the two chairs I owned, and he asked about the thesis, real questions, and somewhere in the second glass he said, "You know what your problem is, professor? Nobody's told you you're good in about thirty years."

"The whiskey's talking."

"The whiskey's barely started." He stood, stretched, and his back popped like a branch. "Anyway. Shed at eight sharp. Your move, Roach. Clock's running."

At the door he turned around.

"For what it's worth," he said, "that wall we share? I'll go easy on it. Only wall I've ever tried to keep standing."

And then he was gone, down the stairs, whistling something tuneless, and I sat there with the whiskey and my red pen and realized I hadn't done a single line of Chapter Two since he knocked.

The bet, of course, was doomed from the start. Neither of us was watching the clock at all.

He fixed my window on the third day. I would like to claim I noticed him doing it, but I didn't, because I was asleep with my face on Chapter Two when I heard glass squeak.

I came out to the landing and there he was, sixty-seven years old, up on a stepladder with a putty knife in his teeth and a whole pane of glass balanced on one forearm like a tray of drinks.

"Alec. What are you doing."

"Glazing," he said around the knife. "Your window's been cracked since Tuesday. Wind comes off the water at night, you're heating the whole ocean."

"That's not your building."

"Nope." He pulled the knife out of his teeth and pointed it at me. "It's mine now, though. Hold the ladder."

"Hold it yourself, you're going to kill us both."

"Then hold it anyway. Less talking, more holding."

So I held it, which is how I learned he'd been keeping a pane of glass and a tube of putty in the bed of his truck like someone who repairs things on principle. He worked the old compound out with a hook knife, seated the new pane, ran a bead around it, and smoothed it with his thumb in one pass. Forty years of that motion. It looked like nothing and it was everything.

Then he did the thing I keep coming back to. He leaned in close to show me the bead, actually took my wrist and put my fingers on the glass edge, said, "Feel that? Even pressure. That is the entire trick," and he was six inches from my face with his breath smelling of coffee and his stubble silver in the bad light, and I did not pull back.

I wish to be honest about that. I did not pull back. Sixty-four years old, widower, load calculations for four decades, and I stood there as a man waiting for a bus that never comes.

"Okay," he said, stepping down. "Good window."

"Thank you," I said, which was inadequate, and he knew it, and he grinned and went back next door.

* * *

On the fourth night he knocked at eight again, and this time he didn't have whiskey.

"Shed's done," he said. "Come look at the wreck."

"You finished it?"

"Finished it this afternoon. Which means, professor, and I'll be gracious about this, you have until tomorrow to