I drew twenty more lines across the box, making stripes two feet wide. Last, I drew a single vertical line down the middle, creating a grid of forty two near-squares, two feet by two and a half. The forty-third segment was the shovel-shaped flare at the end.
Then I rolled up my sleeves, pull-started the compressor, and went back to square one.
The work went faster than I had any right to hope, but not as fast as I had dared to dream – does it ever? It would have been better if I could have used the heavy equipment, but that would come later. The first thing was to carve up the squares of paving. I was not done by midnight and not by three in the morning, when the compressor ran out of gas. I had anticipated this might happen, and was equipped with a siphon for the van’s gas tank. I got as far as unscrewing the gas-cap, but when the smell of the gasoline hit me, I simply screwed the cap back on and lay down flat in the back of the van.
No more, not tonight. I couldn’t. In spite of the work-gloves I had worn, my hands were covered with big blisters, many of them now weeping. My whole body seemed to vibrate from the steady, punishing beat of the jackhammer, and my arms felt like tuning forks gone mad. My head ached. My teeth ached. My back tormented me; my spine felt as if it had been filled with ground glass.
I had cut my way through twenty-eight squares.
Twenty-eight.
Fourteen to go.
And that was only the start.
Never, I thought. It’s impossible. Can’t be done.
That cold hand again.
Yes, my darling. Yes.
The ringing in my ears was subsiding a little now; every once in awhile I could hear an approaching engine… and then it would subside to a drone on the right as it turned onto the detour and started around the loop the Highway Department had created to bypass the construction.
Tomorrow was Saturday… sorry, today. Today was Saturday. Dolan was coming on Sunday. No time.
Yes, my darling.
The blast had torn her to pieces.
My darling had been torn to pieces for telling the truth to the police about what she had seen, for refusing to be intimidated, for being brave, and Dolan was still driving around in his Cadillac and drinking twenty-year-old Scotch while his Rolex glimmered on his wrist.
I’ll try, I thought, and then I fell into a dreamless sleep that was like death.
I woke up with the sun, already hot at eight o’clock, shining in my face. I sat up and screamed, my throbbing hands flying to the small of my back. Work? Cut up another fourteen chunks of asphalt? I couldn’t even walk.
But I could walk, and I did.
Moving like a very old man on his way to a shuffleboard game, I worked my way to the glove compartment and opened it. I had put a bottle of Empirin there in case of such a morning after.
Had I thought I was in shape? Had I really?
Well! That was quite funny, wasn’t it?
I took four of the Empirin with water, waited fifteen minutes for them to dissolve in my stomach, and then wolfed a breakfast of dried fruit and cold Pop-Tarts.
I looked over to where the compressor and the jackhammer waited. The yellow skin of the compressor already seemed to sizzle in the morning sunshine. Leading up to it on either side of my incision were the neatly cut squares of asphalt.
I didn’t want to go over there and pick up that jackhammer. I thought of Harvey Blocker saying, You ain’t never gonna be strong, bubba. Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some wither up and die… Why you pulling this crap on your system?
“She was in pieces,” I croaked. “I loved her and she was in pieces.”
As a cheer it was never going to replace “Go, Bears!” or “Hook em, horns!” but it got me moving. I siphoned gas from the van’s tank, gagging at the taste and the stink, holding onto my breakfast only by a grim act of will. I wondered briefly what I was going to do if the road-crew had drained the diesel from their machines before going home for the long weekend, and quickly shoved the thought out of my mind. It made no sense to worry over things I couldn’t control. More and more I felt like a man who has jumped out of the bay of a B-52 with a parasol in his hand instead of a parachute on his back.