EXCERPT

THE DAY THE WOODS LEFT, Beckett got fired.

His supervisor, the Mouth, was ripping into a kid, barely twenty-years-old, for not properly securing chicken wire to an OSB subfloor.

To no one in particular, to everyone, the Mouth said, This is why you guys will spend your lives doing basements and condos. Nobody’s going to give you a luxury home if you can’t even staple chicken wire to a subfloor. The kid knuckled his chest like he had indigestion. He was Afghan, Muslim, took breaks to pray. When the supervisor left, Beckett went over to help him finish, not immediately or obviously. He complained to the kid about the layout of the condos. Who cared if you had three window walls if there was nowhere to mount a TV?  While they were talking, the kid’s gun malfunctioned or ran out of staples and the Mouth happened to see him struggling to open the magazine. He sent someone to the supplies area for a box of staples. Beckett tried to exchange his staple gun with the kid, but the Mouth pushed Beckett’s hand down to his side.

Load your own gun, he said to the kid.

The kid struggled. He and Beckett were both on their knees in front of The Mouth.

Beckett tried to help him again, but the Mouth touched his steeltoe to Beckett’s thigh to stop him. The kid fumbled, trembling visibly. After a few moments, the Mouth took a box from his henchman and overturned strips of staples on the kid’s head. Some of them bounced off Beckett’s hardhat too and scattered around the two of them.

Everyone froze. The mixing drill went quiet. He was reliving the previous night.

Beckett hadn’t yet recovered from the staple rain, the sound on his hat, the staples that got into his collar. He scanned his body for scrapes. He stood up. His hands were tingling. He wanted to slam the Mouth’s head against the railing outside then hoist him up by the collar and belt and throw him over. Very unQuaker.

The Mouth wasn’t done making an example out of the kid.

He motioned for the five men in the unit to gather round. He went away and made a dramatic re-entry. He slammed a gun and a few boxes of staples on a workbench.

Load the gun, he said. He pointed at Habibi, his henchman, first. He intended to call on them one by one.

Habibi didn’t just load the gun, but he loaded it so quickly, with the blurry fingers of a champion rubix cube solver, that Beckett was unprepared when the Mouth pointed at him. His fingers weren’t just tingling, his hands were shaking.

Load the gun, he said.

Beckett knew what he meant. He was looking at the stapler, but he couldn’t help thinking of a rifle. He approached the bench and tried to work quickly like Habibi. One of his three (half-)brothers was really into guns. That brother used to keep a cutout of an Uzi in his underwear drawer. How many times had Beckett loaded a staple gun, a nail gun, manual, electric, and pneumatic? But today he couldn’t summon the muscle memory to fit the sleeve into the magazine. That brother in Maine was the loudest voice against how Beckett handled his mother’s insurance money. For years after moving to Vancouver, Beckett feared that the brother would track him down and shoot him in the driveway as he was leaving for work. Someone snickered. The test only lasted a few seconds before the Mouth snatched the gun from Beckett. He must have compromised it, Beckett thought. Later, Beckett realized that he had picked up the wrong size staples for that particular stapler and was trying to jam them in.

The other men picked up the correct staples and loaded the gun fine. The Mouth pointed to Beckett and the boy and said, You guys are done. The only job you guys are fit for are blowjobs.

∇

Instead of going home, Beckett drove the kid to a subway station, found himself a drive-through, and ate a two-piece meal in the parking lot of Church’s Chicken. He ate until he felt substantial again. 

He didn’t tell Princess that he was fired at first, because construction crews were fickle. They might not need you on Tuesday but call you on Thursday. He didn’t have deep roots with these guys. He was not Turkish.

The Mouth never liked him. The real reason for firing him had been brewing since Beckett unleashed his superpower. Just as Princess had the gift of looking at someone and surgically operating on them, Beckett was able to look at any room or structure and find things to improve. They both did their mental renovations involuntarily. Beckett was not a talker, but to the Mouth’s irritation he had pointed out the structural posts that would interrupt the view, the acute angles that made furniture arrangement hellish, the cheap aluminum framing, the poor door clearance in the foyer, the lost square footage in a hallway, that chicken wire was not rebar, but the Mouth was all the-plan-says, and Beckett was like, The plan sucks.

He should consider that bridge burnt. 

The firing prompted Beckett to wonder what he was doing with his life what was he but a common labourer a peasant an enslaved member of the proletariat, though Beckett did not know that word, how is it that someone had so much power over him at his age basically dictating whether he could eat or afford toilet paper he was not a child. That was the fury phase. In the avoidant phase that followed, he did a lot of research about living off grid in the mountains or on an island so he would never be at the mercy of anyone again.