The Other Side of the Bridge Read Online Free PDF

was too young for that sort of problem. She was nineteen years younger than his father and had produced Ian when she was only twenty. “Or old guys complaining about their ingrown toenails. I get enough medical crap at home.”
    More silence. The problem with deceiving Pete was that they had known each other too long. A friend who has known you since you were four years old really knows you, whereas your parents only think they do.
    They fished. Across the bay they heard the drone of an outboard, the sound gradually dying as it rounded a point of land. Silence settled again. Then two loons started calling to each other, laughing at some melancholy joke of their own, their cries shimmering back and forth across the water. The color was ebbing out of the trees lining the shore, turning them from somber green to black.
    Pete said, as if ten minutes hadn’t elapsed, “Standing behind a counter is just standing, man. Working on a farm is work .”
    He twitched the jig, paused a second or two, and then jerked the line sharply. A trout broke the surface ten feet away. He hauled it in and dropped it in the bottom of the boat. “You could’ve got a job at the sawmill,” he said, rebaiting his hook and dropping it over the side again. “You’d get a job there easy as nothin’. Every guy there’s had bits of himself stuck back on by your dad sometime or other. They’d make you foreman in three days flat, you’d be running the place in two weeks. Good money, too. More’n Arthur Dunn can afford.”
    “Yeah,” Ian said, “but who wants to spend the summer working for Fitzpatrick? I’ll take Arthur Dunn any day.”
    Pete hauled in a four-inch perch, too small to keep. He unhooked it and tossed it back into the water. “You could’ve got a job waitin’ on tables in Harper’s. Put a cup of coffee down here, pick a cup of coffee up there. Good money, easy work…. Or the library…. Or the gas station.” There was another tug on his line. It was the tiny perch again, the hole in its mouth from last time clearly visible. Pete raised it to eye level and said, “Where’s your brains, man?” The fish gaped in astonishment. Pete tossed it back over the side. “Or the hardware store. Woolworth’s. The post office. Any of them’d be better than a farm. ’Specially Arthur Dunn’s farm.”
    “The farm’s okay,” Ian said mildly. “The horses are kind of fun.”
    “The horses ?” Pete looked at him, slitty-eyed. Then suddenly, he grinned.
    “What?” Ian asked defensively.
    “Nothin’,” Pete said. “Nothin’ at all.”
    They fished for another hour or so but the pike weren’t interested, and when Pete caught the little perch for the third time they gave up and went home.
     
     
     
    His parents were both in the living room when Ian got back. His mother was sitting in front of the television, though for once she wasn’t watching it, and his father was standing in the doorway. When he came in they both looked around. There was a moment’s pause, and then his father said, “You’re home early. Fish not biting?”
    “Nothing worth hauling out of the water,” Ian said.
    His mother was looking vaguely down at her lap. There must have been a crumb or a bit of fluff on her skirt—she picked it off carefully, studied it for a moment, and then dropped it on the floor.

 
     
    TWO
     

    TORONTO BOARD OF TRADE VISITING NORTHERN ONTARIO

    CATTLE RUN AMOK—MEN CHASED TO LUMBER PILES—RIFLES USED
     
    —Temiskaming Speaker, March 1925
     
    A rthur’s earliest memory was of standing in the doorway of his parents’ room, looking at his mother as she lay in bed. It was the middle of the day but nonetheless she was in bed, and Arthur didn’t know what to make of it. The bed was very large and high and Arthur could only just see her. She had her face turned toward the window. Then Arthur’s father called from the bottom of the stairs that the doctor was coming, and she turned her head, and Arthur saw that she was