Light Lifting (11 page)

The guy was carved up so tight it was like the muscles in his back and his stomach were drawn in with the tattoos. When he took off his shirt, he looked like the worst sort of criminal: the kind in the prison movies who do hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups in their cells. It bothered some of our customers to have him around. The young married couples with kids and minivans didn't want a guy like that working in front of their new houses. JC had a special feel for those kind of people. He could sense them. When somebody looked at him like that, he never let it pass. He always wanted to talk to them, explain his whole life story. Tell them how he'd been transformed.

“You do not need to be afraid of me,” he'd say.

One time he started talking like that to a guy who was watering his lawn while we put in his driveway. The man had been staring at us for a couple of minutes and I remember that he was wearing a green golf shirt and he didn't have any shoes on.

Right out of the blue JC said to him, “You can change yourself, you know. It doesn't have to be this way.”

He talked with that funny up and down rhythm that the black preachers have.

“We can change ourselves,” he said. “Just look at me. You have to look if you want to see.”

And then he turned around so the man could read the words and see the pictures on his back.

“I am the proof,” JC said. “I am the proof that you can change. This is the skin of a different man. This is just a shell to remind me of how it used to be. But I am saved now. And you. You can be saved too.”

The guy with the golf shirt just stood there and nodded his head. I don't think there was anything else for him to do. The hose kept dripping water on the grass and JC kept turning himself around. From where I was standing, I couldn't tell if the barefoot guy was having a religious experience or not.

Tom tried to smooth things out after that. Whenever he talked to customers Tom was always professional. He told the barefoot guy that we apologized for the inconvenience and that it would never happen again and that we could discuss a discount or something. But later, when I saw him whispering with JC, Tom was back to himself. There was spit foaming at the corners of his mouth.

“You ever do that again,” he said to JC, “and you're gone.”

Tom was trying to keep himself together, trying to keep it low, but I could hear him breathing hard out of his nose and I could see the way he was trembling all over when he talked. For a second, I thought he might actually haul off and punch JC right there in this guy's backyard. I was thinking that that would have been good for our reputation.

“We'll dump you so fast it'll make your head spin,” Tom told JC. “And then what'll you do? Where would you go then? Nobody else would take you.”

Our company worked guys who couldn't get any other kind of work. Garlatti, our boss, he looked for people like JC and like Tom. Guys who were desperate for a job or stuck because of something they did a long time ago. I worked with Tom for years but I never found out what happened with him. I heard he beat somebody up. Somebody close to him. His wife or his girlfriend or one of his kids, I think, from before. He lived by himself now but I think he still had to pay out almost all the money he made. Tom had to take lots of days off because he was always going to court or to these meetings with some officer who was supposed to keep track of him.

I ate my lunch with Tom every day and every day it was the same thing. At exactly 11:30 he'd go to the back of the truck and haul out his little red cooler. He'd open it up, bring out the cold six-pack, and then he'd drink every one of them in less than half an hour. In all that time, I never saw the guy eat food during lunch. And every day – every single day that we worked together – he made a point of offering that last beer to me, just because he knew I had to stay away from that stuff.

“Come on, Jimmy,” he'd say and he'd wave the last can in front of me. Back and forth and then back and forth another time. “What the hell difference does it make now. You're past all that.”

In the beginning Garlatti paid us absolutely nothing. But every once in a while he softened up a bit. He used to give us these secret raises that we weren't supposed to tell anybody about. One week your check would be fifty or seventy-five dollars bigger and when he handed it to you he'd give the paper a little extra push into your hand so that you'd know not to open it in front of everybody else. That's how he kept his regulars for so long. We kept coming back every week, waiting for that extra fifty bucks to show up.

IT WAS DIFFERENT for the kids though. Garlatti paid them the straight minimum wage and he never budged on that. The man never paid out one cent more than he had to. In the beginning, some of the students tried to pretend that hauling bricks was simply good exercise. Like they figured that if they had to work a bad summer job then they might as well get a tan or get in shape when they were doing it. Guys like that never lasted. Before we got Robbie, Tom must have hired and fired 50 kids, almost one a day since the beginning of the summer.

The job was simple. Carrying bricks, that was it. Carrying bricks all day long and shovelling a little gravel here and there. The kids had to run new brick off the pallets and wheelbarrow away the scraps and the cut pieces. It was their job to keep us stocked up all the time so that me and JC could lay it in nonstop. At first, most of them thought the job couldn't be that hard. But when we needed to, me and JC could lay it down pretty quick. Back and forth, as fast as fast. Somedays, if we got a feeling for it, we could knock off three driveways or maybe five backyard patios.

The kids usually came out in the morning, worked with us for a day, and then quit when we brought them back in the afternoon. It was the best thing for all of us. They didn't even come back at the end of the week to pick up their money. Garlatti was smart. He probably pulled a couple hundred hours of free work from that one little piece of paper he had stuck to a bulletin board down at the employment centre. It was like we had a never ending supply of kids to break down.

But Robbie was the last one we hired that summer. He started on the fifteenth of June and he worked right through to the beginning of September. His sunburn cleared up after a while. For the first couple weeks, when his skin was peeling off, he looked kind of scaly, like he was changing into some sort of lizard guy from a screwed-up experiment, but by the end of the summer he was back to normal. He never took off his shirt again though, so I don't know what kind of scars he got left with.

“Look at him,” Tom said to me once.

It was on that second day, in the afternoon, and Robbie was running, I mean really running, with these bricks. He piled them up between his arms and carried them in stacks of seven or eight. He held the bottom one with his fingers and the top one tucked in just under his chin. Robbie moved with these quick jerky steps. There was nothing smooth about him. He was always halfway between standing up and crouching down.

Anyone who's ever done this kind of work can tell you that the bending over is the worst part of it. Bending over and getting up, and then bending over and getting up again – it's like you're folding and unfolding your body all day. You get creaky. And just that little bit of weight – just the weight that's in a couple bricks – that's enough to grind you down. Any kid can pick up a hundred pounds if they only have to do it one or two times. But it's the light lifting that does the real damage. Maybe it's just thirty pounds and it starts off slow, but it stays with you all day and then it hangs around in your arms and your legs even after you leave. That kind of lifting hits you in the knees first and then in your shoulders and your neck. It used to surprise our summer student kids. It would catch them off-guard, usually in the early afternoon, just after lunch. One minute they'd be loud and laughing and tossing the brick around like it was nothing and then, all of a sudden, that little grinding pain would wind up and get a hold of them. You could almost see it tightening around them. It was like they got old all at once. They'd hunch over and get really quiet and start concentrating on the smallest things, trying to figure out what went wrong.

But Robbie ran the brick faster than we could lay it down. Sometimes he'd have to wait for us to catch up and he'd stand there watching everything we did. For him, it was like putting in a driveway was important work. After a month I think we forgot that this wasn't his real life and that he was just passing through.

“He's the best guy we ever had for that job,” JC told me. “It's like he has a gift. He loves it.”

Robbie worked with us during the crazy time when the city was growing all day and all night and there was more work than anyone could do. I'm glad I don't live in a house that went up at that time because it was all speed more than it was doing it right. If you could swing a hammer and carry a two-by-four, you were framing houses.

Garlatti overbooked us a lot. When we had too many jobs, the work we did was never very good. We were always rushing to get to the next place and we cut a lot of corners. When it slowed down and there was nothing coming up, then we took our time. We stretched everything as far as it would go.

I liked to get it right. Make it perfect. I liked the one-of-a-kinder jobs. Like when some lady wanted us to put a connecting circle pattern in her back patio. We could do that. Or when a guy wanted to write out his initials in the stone of his driveway. People asked us to do that kind of stuff for them. They wanted a big capital M in there with a different colour brick.

I know that most people don't pay attention to paving stone when they're walking on it, but they don't know how hard it is to do something like that. When you're laying down a special job, you gotta be able to see the end before you can start. I stayed up all night sometimes with a piece of graph paper, trying to figure out how to put some stupid “Q” in there and still make everything else fit.

Once when we were doing a job like that – putting in the connecting circles – Robbie asked me to show him how to do it. He wanted to know how I made the whole thing come together.

I took out my paper from the night before and I showed him how to draw out the circles with a compass and how to colour in the squares where they overlapped. I told him about how you always had to keep it balanced when you were laying it in.

“When you do something on one side, then you got to do it on the other side too,” I said. “You gotta make two circles at the same time.”

I showed him how to cut the small pieces so you didn't waste any brick and how to bring the curve around slowly so it looked natural.

Robbie's eyes flicked between the paper and the patio we were building. I could see that he was really studying this stuff. Figuring it out. He'd ask me a question and I'd answer and we went back and forth like that. It was great. Before that, I never taught anybody anything.

WE HARDLY EVER GOT TO DO that kind of speciality work though. It was too expensive and it took too long to set up. When we were busy, it was pure assembly line. Churning through it. Never much of anything unique. If I wanted to slow down because something was a bit off, or I wanted to show Robbie how to get around a tricky corner, Tom would start yelling at us and say, “For Chrissake, just give it a whack and make it fit. It's construction here, you're not building no watch.”

We spent most of our time in the new subdivisions. South-wood Lakes, Castlepoint, Elmwood. They all had names like that. It was a goldmine for Garlatti. The houses were all the same and every one of them needed a big two-car driveway in the front and a little circle patio for the barbecue in the back. We stormed from one lot to the next, building all these driveways onto the empty street.

There were other companies in there too. With their own trucks and their own names painted on the side. Roofers and electricians and plumbers. Everybody was making money then. They were building the big wooden decks, or putting in the Jacuzzi bathtubs and the automatic garage door openers. The other kind of summer kids were there too. The ones who started their own landscaping companies. They were always under our feet, trying to carry around their rolls of sod and those big bags of wood chips. Southwood Lakes was the fanciest of all those places. There was a big brown wall that went all the way around it and was supposed to keep out the noise from the highway. Every one of those houses had a view of the lakes.

We were working out there when they actually dug those lakes and it was like nothing I ever saw. A surveyor went around with a can of special spray paint and he took some readings and then drew these gigantic weird bendy shapes on the ground. Took him about a week to get it done. One time, I met him at the canteen truck and asked him how it was going and he said that they'd start digging tomorrow. The next day they came in with the heavy machinery and just followed the lines, like a cut-out in a colouring book, five feet deep all the way across.

“See that,” I said to Robbie, “I guess that's how you make a lake.”

But that was it. One week it was grass, the next week it was water. And everybody had a view. They put a filter system in there, like a swimming pool, so that the lake didn't get all swampy. Southwood was supposed to be a nice place to live. Nice if you had kids.

When they first filled those Southwood Lakes with water, JC took off all his clothes and swam around in there naked. He dove down and showed us his completely unmarked ass. And he kept calling to us to come out there and join him. He would baptize us again, he said, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Robbie and I just laughed at him. We were sitting in the shade of a big tree that hadn't even been there two days before. But Tom didn't think it was so funny. He grabbed himself through his jeans and yelled out that if JC wanted to see him naked he could walk right up here and suck his dick.