“You got to be kidding, my friend. I mean, you have got to be. We talkin desert sun and desert heat here – none of that yuppie tanning-salon shit. What are you in real life, bubba? An accountant?”
“A teacher,” I said. “Third grade.”
“Oh, honey,” he said, and laughed again. “Get out my face, okay?”
I had a pocket watch – handed down from my great-grandfather, who worked on the last stretch of the great transcontinental railroad. He was there, according to family legend, when they hammered home the golden spike. I took the watch out and dangled it in Blocker’s face on its chain.
“See this?” I said. “Worth six, maybe seven hundred dollars.”
“This a bribe?” Blocker laughed again. A great old laugher was he. “Man, I’ve heard of people making deals with the devil, but you’re the first one I ever met who wanted to bribe himself into hell.” Now he looked at me with something like compassion. “You may think you understand what you’re tryin to get yourself into, but I’m here to tell you you don’t have the slightest idea. In July I’ve seen it go a hundred and seventeen degrees out there west of Indian Springs. It makes strong men cry. And you ain’t strong, bubba. I don’t have to see you with your shirt off to know you ain’t got nothin on your rack but a few yuppie health-club muscles, and they won’t cut it out in the Big Empty.”
I said, “The day you decide I can’t cut it, I’ll walk off the job. You keep the watch. No argument.”
“You’re a fucking liar.”
I looked at him. He looked back for some time.
“You’re not a fucking liar.” He said this in tones of amazement.
“No.”
“You’d give the watch to Tinker to hold?” He cocked his thumb at a humongous black man in a tie-dyed shirt who was sitting nearby in the cab of a bulldozer, eating a fruit-pie from McDonald’s and listening.
“Is he trustworthy?”
“You’re damned tooting.”
“Then he can hold it until you tell me to take a hike or until I have to go back to school in September.”
“And what do I put up?”
I pointed to the employment application in his fist. “Sign that,” I said. “That’s what you put up.”
“You’re crazy.”
I thought of Dolan and of Elizabeth and said nothing.
“You’d start on shit-work,” Blocker warned. “Shovelling hotpatch out of the back of a truck and into potholes. Not because I want your damned watch – although I’ll be more than happy to take it – but because that’s where everyone starts.”
“All right.”
“As long as you understand, bubba.”
“I do.”
“No,” Blocker said, “you don’t. But you will.”
And he was right.
I remember next to nothing about the first couple of weeks – just shovelling hot-top and tamping it down and walking along behind the truck with my head down until the truck stopped at the next pothole. Sometimes we worked on the Strip and I’d hear the sound of jackpot bells ringing in the casinos. Sometimes I think the bells were just ringing in my head. I’d look up and I’d see Harvey Blocker looking at me with that odd look of compassion, his face shimmering in the heat baking off the road. And sometimes I’d look over at Tinker, sitting under the canvas parasol which covered the cab of his dozer, and Tinker would hold up my great-granddad’s watch and swing it on the chain so it kicked off sunflashes.
The big struggle was not to faint, to hold onto consciousness no matter what. All through June I held on, and the first week of July, and then Blocker sat down next to me one lunch hour while I was eating a sandwich with one shaking hand. I shook sometimes until ten at night. It was the heat. It was either shake or faint, and when I thought of Dolan I somehow managed to keep shaking.
“You still ain’t strong, bubba,” he said.
“No,” I said. “But like the man said, you should have seen the materials I had to start with.”
“I keep expecting to look around and see you passed out in the middle of the roadbed and you keep not doing it. But you gonna.”