The Boulder cont...

Dad thought he detected a heavy dose of condescension in the man’s voice. “Uh-huh.”

“Build it yourself?”

Dad continued in his bisyllabic way.

“Amazing! It’s beautiful!” said Mr. Loganrooney. He swallowed some spit that had been accumulating in his mouth.

“Well, I’ll tell you why I came to bother you, Mr. Levesskew.”

He smiled and looked up into Dad’s eyes.

“I’ve come to make you a proposition.”

Dad did not even bother with a monosyllable this time.

“That big rock over there...” said Mr. Loganrooney, pointing to the large boulder.
Dad turned around and looked in the direction the man was pointing, as though he did not know which big rock he meant. He repressed a smile. “Yes,” he said.

“Would you consider parting with it?”

Dad took a minute to let the words completely sink in.

“Well now,” he said, admiring the fancy wheel caps on the car behind the paunchy man, “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about that. What would you do with it?”

“Well, you see, we did find a property, my wife and I, about ten miles from here on the lake, but the problem is it doesn’t have much character, apart from being beside the water. When we came to see this one here, before you bought it, we noticed that boulder there, and now my wife and I, we were thinking that it would make a great decoration beside our house.”

“How would you get it out of here?”

“Oh, that would be no problem. I have already talked to contractors about that and it’s no problem at all.”

“And when would they come to take it away?” asked Dad in the tone of a man asking the doctor how much longer his wife has before the cancer steals her away.

“They could be here tomorrow, if that wasn’t too soon,” said Mr. Loganrooney.

Dad rubbed his unshaved, unscented chin. “Hmm,” he said.

The man put his hand in his trouser pocket, and pulled out a cheque book. He brought out an expensive gold fountain pen from the inside pocket of his suit jacket. The lawyer who had made Dad sign the contract for his patent had used a pen almost identical to it. It was of the kind he had seen in Birks’, years before when he had naïvely gone in, thinking he could buy my mother an anniversary present there. That was before he had humiliatingly found out how much things cost.

Dad backed away a few steps. Mr. Loganrooney started walking past him, towards the boulder. He kept a good ten feet away from Dad. Ti-Noir was following them, wagging his tail as if he had just discovered a nice, plump rabbit, snared the night before. When the man had his back to Dad, Dad asked him how much he thought the boulder would be worth.

Mr. Loganrooney turned around. “Would you take five hundred for it?” He turned again towards the stone, always keeping Dad and the machete in his peripheral vision.