skids and ate our lunch Not even a month later, with my crew and me sent to prep a new job site, we sat around on some freshly delivered. It was late August now and felt like it. The sun shed its light at a different angle, the heat had broken by a few degrees, and even the high school in front of us radiated a different mood somehow (as if it, even though obviously inanimate, a mere building, was gearing up to accept its screaming hordes with all their hopes and worries).
Again, my guys scarfed down some kind of fast food, Wendy’s, Burger King, or whatever.We ate quietly, with only the sound of chewing, newspaper rattling, and straw sucking breaking the silence, until Joel lifted one leg off of his skid and squeezed out a moist-sounding blaaattt.
“Oh, shit. Sorry guys,” he said, holding up his milkshake and looking abashed.
I’ll state right now, I’m not sure who commented next. In fact, as much as I’ve tried, I don’t remember either of the other two men’s names, although Jeffery keeps popping up for one of them. In my mind, they were interchangeable, seemingly hardworking but never getting dirty, one blonde and one dark-haired, both back to school in the fall with dreams of becoming chartered accountants or television executives or civilians of that stature. Nevertheless, one of them, let’s say Jeffery, spoke: “Y’know, Joel. The police should confiscate that thing before you kill somebody else — just pat you down and take it right out of your pants.”
The other one followed.“Or at least dust it for prints, slap a serial number on it, then make you register it.”
“Hey,” Jeffery added, turning to his friend,“maybe he thinks he’s a rogue superhero,‘The Human Gas Chamber,’ dealing out his rough and fatal brand of impulsive justice.”
They both guffawed, beaming at their articulation and wit. I looked at Joel. He didn’t find them at all funny.
“Come on, guys. Give it a rest,” I said. “Oh, oh, just one more!” Jeffery said, sounding like a schoolboy. “How’s this: clickety-clack, clickety-clack, follow the line, just don’t sniff my crack, or you’ll find yourself dead on your ba—”
Joel’s milkshake flew as he leapt from the skid and threw a roundhouse right. Jeffery hunched and took the blow on his upturned shoulder; then, scrambling off of his skid, snarling, with his hands up, the frat boy stood, ready to do battle. But before anything else could unfold, I grabbed Joel and pulled him back.
“Stop it!” I yelled.“The next person to move, or even speak, is fired.They can collect their stuff and go home.”
No one moved or spoke, and I spent the next ten minutes smoothing things over. Good resumé padding, I suppose, being able to mediate on-the-job disputes (although, ironically, look where that particular skill got me). But all the while, as I kept tomorrow’s pillars of the community from each other’s throats, the stupidity of the situation screamed at me. On one side, I tried to calm a man who, when stretching logic to its limit, carried this legacy: he’d killed a guy once, not in a bar fight in Abilene, but with an egg fart while laying paving stones. And on the other side, I tried to reason with the person who’d taunted the egg-fart killer into attacking him — in the process belittling a man I knew and respected, a man who wasn’t yet dead a month.
Ever since I pulled those receipts from that shoebox, dredging old memories with them, I’ve contemplated those characters now and again, wondering if Joel ever truly got over the incident, or if he’d stayed as I saw him when we shook hands on his last day of work back then, smiling slightly to be polite, but looking preoccupied, like a man with something else on his mind.
As for Jeffery (?), what would you even find if you could get into the head of the vacuous? Vast, empty stretches? Constant nattering, the mental equivalent of Styrofoam chips filling those stretches? Me, I, then me again ad infinitum? I don’t know, maybe I’m being unfair. He was twenty years old back then, just filling up with experiences, and that was one of them. I’ve undoubtedly done worse without the benefit of being held responsible — or even learning from it.
Then there’s Constantine, the same age then as I am now and the father of three kids when he handed in his lunch pail. His death wasn’t mystical or absurd, like an incident from a John Irving novel. I’m sure the coroner’s report didn’t list the cause of Constantine’s death as accidental inhalation of foreign flatulence enhanced by inadvertent rectal proximity; it probably stated something more succinct, like massive myocardial infarction — something I can imagine lurking around any one of my corners.
And, ultimately, that’s the rub, I guess. I am the same age as Constantine was back then; the years in between have vanished — they’re nothing but spent fuel as I sputter towards my latter days.
What have I accomplished in that time?
Nothing. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack is still all I’ve ever earned a living at.
And what have I learned from all of this?
That in the course of this lifetime, the odds of getting ahead don’t necessarily increase — just as the odds of taking one in the face don’t always decrease — with how hard you work.
At least I still was working when Maddy and I caught wind of the party.
That was just over a month ago, back in late June, when Katie Jansen phoned to tell us that she’d been contacted for a number of people’s addresses and to expect something in the mail. From out of our collective pasts, from another lifetime, really, Sarah Brightman-Crowley, a tenant in Adam Wright’s house for a while, had reappeared and was trying to locate people who’d been part of that group in ’82 and ’83.
Apparently, she and her husband, Jack Crowley, had developed a software package that had rocketed them from well off to filthy rich, and they were now rounding up ex-business associates, long-forgotten friends, members from their old alma mater, and anyone else they could think of to strut their stuff in front of in a business launch/housewarming party extravaganza.
For a day or two I felt a foreboding, as if this event would entail shitloads of posing from every possible angle and that nothing good could come of it. I should have listened to my inner voice; instead I quashed it, concentrating on the positive. They were bound to have an awesome bar.
The RSVP eventually came, stating casual attire; so on the night of the party, facing no gut-wrenching clothing decisions, I plucked my only jacket and my ever-faithful Dockers from their hangers and slipped into them. Maddy, on the other hand, stood in front of the full-length mirror hanging from the back of the bathroom door, hmmming and hawing, draping first one and then the other of two possible outfits in front of her. I could have stepped in and told her that she looked great in either one, and meant every word of it, but she’d have thought I was just trying to hurry her.
A short time later, she stepped into the bedroom. She’d chosen her outfit, my choice exactly now that I’d seen her in it, and had applied her usual minimal amount of makeup; my urge to be with her, to be proud of her, overwhelmed me.
“I’m ready,” she said. “You certainly are,” I answered, Maurice-fuckin’-Chevalier smooth. I walked to her and kissed her on the cheek.
We trooped to the rec room and found the children. With the summer holidays starting the following Wednesday, they were about to gain a slight head start in their first taste of real freedom — not a Tuesday evening from seven till ten, or a Sunday afternoon, but a full Friday night with a possible 2:00 a.m. return time and no signs of supervision anywhere; so we stood before them now with our list of rules at the ready, brandishing the cellphone we’d be employing and attempting to blunt their mounting sense of adventure with talk of trust and responsibility.
And as Maddy picked up steam, I slipped back up to the kitchen; for the true, hard-core discipline lectures about “rules” she held more karmic weight anyhow, as my searching for and plucking of my on-the-go joint from behind the sewing kit on top of the fridge would suggest. Not that Maddy didn’t mind the odd toke these days, but she had laid off for some time, thinking it not