Light Lifting (12 page)

WE NEVER REALLY KNEW OUR CUSTOMERS. Sometimes the driveways we were building were going onto houses that hadn't even been sold yet. Everything was empty out there. Like a ghost town in the middle of a field, but full of mansions. Once in a while we'd get a renovation job back in the old part of the city and when we came back to the normal streets we could see all the differences. There was traffic and all the houses were different shapes and there were kids and dogs everywhere.

We were doing a job like that when the old lady who hired us recognized Robbie.

“Is that you Robert,” she said. You could tell she was uncertain, kind of like she couldn't believe it.

All of us looked up at the same time because it was strange to have a customer talking right to us. But here was this lady and she was calling him Robert. He smiled at her.

“Yes, it's me,” he said. “How are you?”

“Oh, I'm good, I'm good,” she said. “Just coming back from the school. Getting ready for the new year. Lots of preparation to do, you know.” She had a bag full of papers.

“This is it for you, right?” she said. “You'll be graduating this year.”

“Yes,” Robbie said. “This is it. One year left.”

In the back of my head I always knew that Robbie and most of the other kids who worked with us were still only in high school, but I never really thought about it before. It threw me a bit, seeing him talk to that lady about graduating and school sports teams and calculus classes. I looked over at JC and then at Tom. I thought about JC saying his prayers at night and how Tom and I would go home and cook ourselves a dinner and then sit there in front of the TV and watch a ball game. For me, it'd been like that for so long, I think I stopped wondering about how it could be different for anybody else. Robbie was probably seventeen years old. What did a kid like that do when he went home? You could spend all this time working with a guy and still be totally different inside. I thought about how we were all stuck, all of us put in our places. I thought about how your life could be like a brick and how it was hard to move it once you got settled into the same place for a couple years.

“So this is your summer job, then,” the lady said.

She looked at us and smiled and then she said to JC – like she was joking with him – “I hope you fellas aren't working him too hard. Robert is one of the best. You take care of him, okay?”

“We will,” JC said quickly. He talked in that same over-keen way that people use when they're trying to impress their teachers. “We'll take care of him.”

She went into her house and then five minutes later she came out with a big pitcher of lemonade for all of us.

“Robert,” she said. “When you have your break, why don't you come inside for a bite of lunch?”

He stopped for a second, but it wasn't like he needed to think about it. Everything that came out of that boy's mouth came out natural.

“Thanks,” he said. “But I can only come if we all go.”

She was a little surprised, but she was quick on her feet and she rolled right along with it.

“Oh of course, of course,” she said. “That's what I meant. There's room for all of you.”

And that's how it happened. Robbie and me and JC and Tom ended up sitting around the kitchen table with this old lady. Eating her tuna fish sandwiches with the crusts cut off and the Oreo cookies and the big glasses of milk. JC got down on his knees and said grace beside the table. He thanked God for the food and for bringing us all together and for keeping us healthy. And the lady kept filling up our glasses and bringing more cookies. Every once in a while, Robbie and I would glance back at each other smiling our heads off. Tom just sat there, completely quiet. I think he was wishing for his little red cooler. It was all I could do not to burst out laughing. Quite the scene. We were like the opposite of one big happy family.

ON THE LAST FRIDAY that Robbie worked with us, we all decided to quit early. We'd been going like mad for nearly three months, six or seven days a week, and Garlatti decided that we could take the half-day. So we knocked off right at twelve noon and we decided that we'd take Robbie out for lunch because we didn't know when we were going to see him again. He was starting school again the next week.

“If you ever need a job, we got one for you,” Tom said. It was probably the only nice thing I ever heard him say.

“You can make good money in this business,” he said. It was like he was trying to convince himself.

“There's lots of side jobs, lots of under-the-table stuff. Opportunities all around. You should think about it.”

Robbie said that he would.

We took him to this bar called the Silver Bullet. Tom picked the place. He said they had good lunch specials. The sign for the Silver Bullet had a cartoon girl wearing a little skimpy bikini top and she was riding on a big silver bullet. She had a cowboy hat that she waved in the air while she smiled her big smile. They didn't charge us anything, or even check Robbie for ID, because it was still so early and that kind of business didn't get going until much later on. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the mirrors and the strobe lighting and the rest of it. It took a while before I could see.

The only other people in there were the staff and then this other big group of guys wearing matching blue coveralls. I think they were a road crew because their clothes were all covered in black tar and they smelled like asphalt. There were probably ten of them.

“City workers,” Tom said and he snorted. “They need twenty guys to fill in a pot hole.”

We ordered some food and JC bought everybody a round of beer and a ginger ale for me. We sat there all quiet. It was like none of us even knew how to talk. There was an afternoon ball game on so we watched that and once in a while somebody would say something after a nice catch or a double play. We ate the burgers, and they drank their beers. And then Tom bought a round, and I bought a round, and even Robbie bought a round. Then it started again. The waitress kept bringing the bottles and taking them away. After a while I started to feel a little rough because I can't sit in a bar for too long. They had all the hard stuff right out in the open. The bottles were lined up behind the counter. I watched Robbie drinking his beers and laughing with those guys and it made me feel kind of sick, like I was doing something wrong. I was just jumpy, I suppose, but I could tell it wasn't good.

Then Tom got up to go to the john. When he walked past the guys from the road crew, I saw him lean over their table and say something to them. I knew right then that there was going to be trouble. There were more of them than us, they'd been here longer than us, and they'd gone through more rounds.

One of the guys on the other side of the table got up and he started waving and shouting at Tom, telling him to fuck off and just move along. I prayed that Tom would just shut up but I knew he couldn't. With Tom, it was instinct. He was like a Pitbull. It didn't matter how long he'd been nice because one day he'd just have turn on you. There was a pure meanness inside of him that he couldn't do anything about.

I heard Tom say something about the union and about how these guys had never done a day of real work in their lives. He spit on the floor. Then two more of the men were standing up and they were trying to separate Tom from the guy who was yelling at him. They each tried to take hold of one of his arms and lead him away. Another guy looked over at us and kind of waved so that we'd come and get him. But it was too late. Tom pushed one of those guys off him and he tripped and fell into the table and the glasses spilled and bottles were breaking.

“Fucking pussies,” Tom shouted. “You're all a bunch of pussies.”

Then the guy behind Tom hit him over the head with a full bottle of beer and he went down.

JC was across the room so fast, I didn't even see him move. He was over there in one second. And there were two more blue overall guys there to meet him but they couldn't stop it. It was like JC just flicked a switch in his head and he was back to being the kind of guy he looked like. He went right for the one who hit Tom with the beer bottle. In one swoop JC was over the table and he swung at the guy so hard that when his hand came into the other guy's face the guy's nose just exploded. JC had his whole body behind that punch. When he came up on the other side, JC had blood on his face but I knew it wasn't his.

Robbie and I started to go over and some of them came to get us. It was like we were all in this game and everybody knew the rules and everybody needed to be partnered up. The staff were screaming at us, calling us all drunk pieces of shit and trying to push the whole thing outside into the parking lot. During all of this – even when one of the coverall guys with a big ring on his finger smashed his hand into the space right between my nose and my eye – I kept wondering how we could have made this not happen on Robbie's last day. At the same time, I was thinking that it couldn't be avoided.

When we came out into the back parking lot I saw Tom lying balled up on the ground. There was blood coming out of one of his ears. Two of the blue overall guys were taking turns kicking him in the head and in the ribs with their big boots.

Another guy ran up to me and put his two hands on my shoulders. Then he pulled me forward and jammed his knee up as hard as he could right square between my legs. I felt something tearing and I went down. The two guys left Tom to go for somebody else behind me, but I couldn't get up and I couldn't breathe right and I couldn't turn around.

Tom wasn't moving anymore. He just lay there, face up, on the hot asphalt, between the yellow lines of a parking spot. It was so warm. We'd only been in there for a couple hours and it was still very early in the day, probably not even three o'clock yet. The sun just kept streaming down on us, all bright and summery. It wasn't right and I kept wishing for it to be darker so I didn't have to see it all so clearly.

Adult Beginner I

T
here is a sequence to follow. Two steps.

Mel explains it again.

“You go all the way out,” she says. “Then all the way down.”

She points over the edge and into the dark. Very specific. As if there is only one spot, a particular place in the sky, you have to reach before you can turn and head for the water. Her arm sways through an up-and-down roller coaster motion. “You swan dive it, right? Out first, then down. Know what I mean?”

The wind picks up and pushes them both forward. Up here, the air feels colder than it did before and the bugs are bad. Stace waves a swarm away from her nose. Down below, a thin layer of mist smokes above the water.

Mel pulls back another swallow from her Wildberry wine cooler and circles her thumb and finger around the clear neck of the bottle. She is still wet from the last time and uses her foot to re-smear the line on the roofing tar. It is two-thirty in the morning, but the tar or the melted tires or whatever toxic black substance they use to coat the roof is warm and spongy, holding on to the heat from the day.

“Right from here,” she says. “Then fast as you can until, bang, you hit the side and you're gone.” There's a hard stomp in the middle of her instructions.

“And when you're out there, you put your hands wide like this, like you're flying. Like one of those cliff divers in Mexico. And you keep your chin way, way up and you keep moving out, out, out as far as you can. Then when you feel the out giving up, you pull a quick tuck and go for the water.”

Mel moves her whole body as she acts it out. Her chin strains upward, arms stretched to a capital T. Then a complete creasing fold at the waist, palms flattening on the roof. Fluorescent pink wine cooler foams in her bottle like radioactive potion. Her hips and shoulders, all her limbs and joints, move loose and graceful and drunk. She is unstoppable.

“If you get mixed up,” she says, trying to steady her stare into Stace's eyes, trying to make the words come out separately, one-by-one, and clear.

“If you get mixed up, remember the lights are blinking inside the river. That's the water, right? Not the sky. The lights are reflecting inside the river and you reach down into the lights. Don't get lost and get yourself all turned around or you end up belly-flopping or just falling straight off the side.”

“Down to the light,” Stace nods. “Right.”

“Some people use the buildings on the other side. They look at the Renaissance Center and keep themselves in line with that. I think you're supposed to dive down like you're following the elevators. Doesn't matter really. Just keep track of where you are and make sure you go in smooth.”

There are seven of them up here on the roof of the hotel – four guys and three girls – and everyone else has already done it two or three times. It is nothing new. Kids have been jumping from this spot, the top of the Waterfront Holiday Inn, for years. The Odeon movie theatre is connected, built right into the hotel, and not long ago the two sets of owners were supposed to hook up and hire some extra security to finally put a stop to this kind of stuff, but nothing really changed. They only had enough money for a weekend guy and this is a Tuesday. Stace knows they will not be caught. Nobody is going to climb up that ladder and stop this from happening.

The routine is simple. They start behind the line and sprint to the edge and scream as they take the last step and disappear headfirst into the dark. Then there's a long, long moment of quiet and then the splash. After that, more waiting, a second long second of quiet, and then the surfacing, followed by screaming and clapping and shouting. Somebody always says
Hoe-lee Fuck
and somebody else always says
Un-fuckingbelievable.

Stace is going to do it, too. Doing is the only thing left. But it will have to happen soon. There are reasons not to, of course, obvious ones, but they seem flimsy and unconvincing right now and in the end every risk has to be measured relative to doing nothing at all. She feels it coming, though. The advance presence of a killer threat. Real danger waiting off to the side. It swirls around them like faint smoke drifting in from an approaching forest fire, but nobody else cares. What are the chances? It is the middle of summer, the night after a sunny day, and the wind is the only thing that demands real attention. A bad gust at the wrong time could mess with your trajectory during the sixty-foot drop. One of the guys sucks back a wad of phlegm and gobs over the side to test what happens to his spit on the way down.