My crew, on the other hand, was far less professional. College students grabbing work between April and September or guys just waiting to find their true calling (I’d fallen into the abyss lurking somewhere between those two groups), they were the type who favoured faded blue jeans to work pants or sweats; their T-shirts bore no stains or rips and they left their workboots fashionably unlaced. Twenty years down the road they’d be telling their children how they wouldn’t have lasted a day doing what they (the fathers) had done, toiling like Egyptian slaves beneath an unyielding sun way back when, before the real estate market or whatever had given them the bounty they enjoyed today.
They were, in short, a part-time summer crew, the kind I always seemed to be saddled with, and every day, come noon, one of my guys would troop down the street to the McDonald’s (conveniently located two blocks from the high school on a main thoroughfare) to pick up food for everyone but me — a steadfast brown bagger.
Who knows, maybe that lunchtime routine played a small part in the greater scheme of things, although by no means am I blaming McDonald’s, a much-maligned corporation, for the bizarre turn of events that unfolded that day. Undoubtedly, Constantine’s hour had come and nothing at that juncture in time could have altered the fact.
First of all, the heat alone was dangerous. By two-thirty that afternoon, the lot of us felt drugged, and although it wasn’t Constantine’s call or mine, we probably should have gone home. We moved around the site in various stages of mock labour, walking as if we were treading the bottom of a swimming pool, barely halfway past our daily goal of laying one thousand square feet of paving stones.A stretch of limestone lay before us, already levelled and ready to accept the remaining five hundred square feet.
If not for the heat and the horrible density of our work material, the scene would have been pleasant. The high school itself, urban and in a better part of town, was stately — a sprawl of brick and stone, grass and benches. Full green trees peppered its grounds, keeping us in shade, and no one bothered us.Almost everyone (in this postal code, at least) was at work, at their cottage up north, or sequestered in their house, sipping lemonade and basking in central air.
So we stayed on, lingering, cleaning up the site a bit, until finally Joel Scott made a bold move. Brought in as a general labourer that spring, he’d hardened during the summer and become comfortable with a wheelbarrow — although you could still see his uneasiness with the skill parts of the job, the artisan element, I guess you’d call it. But if you learned how to level the limestone base, or how to lay stone quickly and well, you’d make three bucks an hour more; this was his chance, with no pressure and no one else on the line, to gain some experience — and with it some extra cash before going back to school.
Joel bent over in his lineman’s stance with stacks of brick scattered around him and started slowly. “Clickety-clack, click-ety-clack, just follow the line and break your back.”
And that’s all you had to do, really.With a herringbone pattern and a rectangular paver, you just made sure that every second stone, the lead stone parallel to the string you’d laid out in advance, didn’t waver. If you did that, every line in your sidewalk, fire lane, driveway, or patio would end up perfectly straight — theoretically.
Of course you require experience to gain the touch required to lay the stones clickety-clack, that is with speed, while not drifting off the line, but Joel was game, the tip of his tongue poking out between set teeth. Finally, when he’d laid far enough ahead to allow another man to fill in behind him on the forty-five-degree angle, Constantine moved in.The rest of us stood watching, slightly intrigued by Joel’s decision to take a shot at laying, to see how things would play out between him and Constantine.
The shit hit the fan almost instantly — and almost literally. In a moment of random chance, Joel pivoted as Constantine stretched, both men in their three-point stance as they reached for a stack of stones to lay; and, bad enough that they resembled two dogs checking each other out at the park, Joel chose that exact moment to break thunderous wind, trumpeting a snootful of hot, rank gas directly into Constantine’s face.
A clamour filled the air, with Constantine rearing back, his hands aloft, as if he’d been caught in a furnace explosion. He bellowed,“What the fuck!”
At the same moment, Joel scrambled to his feet, babbling, “Oh, Christ! I’m sorry, Constantine. It’s the McDonald’s ... the shake! I’m lactose intolerant!” He backed up now, his hands also in the air, as if Constantine were going to attack him or whip a gun from his work pants pocket.“It just slipped out,” he continued, then tripped over a stack of bricks.
The two Manuels, both bent over with their hands on their knees, jiggled with mirth. Finally one of them, dragging a knuckle under one eye to remove a glistening drop, pointed to the two of them.
“Good fucking shot, Joel. Right in the kisser,” he said in his familiar accent.
Of course, either of the two Manuels, slightly older than Constantine and at the same skill level, could get away with this. Joe, as the youngster of the group, could only turn away and study the treetops, his shoulders shimmying as he looked skyward.
And my guys? Well, they knew the pecking order — at least the job-site pecking order. One of them walked over and helped Joel to his feet; the other stood silently, waiting for the scene to play itself out.
And it did, with Joel’s pathetic apologies and the stench of hot sulphur finally fading away. Still, Constantine continued to give him the evil eye, and not because he was a petty man.The incident, as unintentional as it was, had been humiliating (or, as Joe, city-born and anglicized to the brim said to me so succinctly a moment later as we cut open a new skid of bricks: “Accident or not, if you’re going to take one in the teeth like that, it’d better be from a fuckin’ lingerie model while you’re diggin’ in and not from some sweaty-arsed greenhorn in front of the entire crew”).
So an unease settled over the site, which in turn kick-started us. Joel fell into carrying for Constantine, as a kind of unspoken penance for his act, and Constantine laid as only he could, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, moving up the line as fast as he could, possibly attempting to break Joel’s back. I returned from the skid with a handful of bricks and started installing beside Constantine. Before long, the others followed suit, scurrying around purposefully.
By six o’clock we’d completed our thousand square feet, and it looked good — straight and precise, cut in at the edges, and with the level as smooth as a sheet of glass — but the old maxim, as I knew it would, held true.When I tried to stand up straight at the end of the laying spurt, my lower back screamed as if broken (with my hamstrings supplying the harmony).You couldn’t avoid the physiology. The plebes laying down the Appian Way twenty-five hundred years ago would have unfurled themselves in that same slow-motion manner at the end of their workday, wincing, pushing up off of their thighs, feeling as if they’d abused muscle tissue so badly it would never straighten out again.
I glanced at Constantine. He remained bent over, too, but something about him looked ... grievous. Sweat dripped off of him as if he’d been doused with a bucket of water, and all traces of blood had fled his olive complexion. He tried to straighten, wobbled briefly, then pitched forward.With no hint of restraint, his face piled into the freshly laid stone; he kept sliding forward, ripping the skin from his cheek.
I stood up immediately, no longer feeling my back or legs; the seriousness of what had just happened overrode all the small stuff.When a man like Constantine (strong like bull, etc.) drops the way he dropped, you don’t think the worst, you know it. I didn’t bother checking him. I just turned, bolted for the corner pay phone, and punched in 911, figuring every second might count.
I was wrong.Apparently, he’d died before he hit the ground: massive coronary.