“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. If you stay behind the truck with a shovel, you gonna.”
“No.”
“Hottest part of the summer still coming on, bubba. Tink calls it cookiesheet weather.”
“I’ll be fine.”
He pulled something out of his pocket. It was my great-granddad’s watch. He tossed it in my lap. “Take this fucking thing,” he said, disgusted. “I don’t want it.”
“You made a deal with me.”
“I’m calling it off.”
“If you fire me, I’ll take you to arbitration,” I said. “You signed my form. You…”
“I ain’t firing you,” he said, and looked away. “I’m going to have Tink teach you how to run a front-end loader.”
I looked at him for a long time, not knowing what to say. My third-grade classroom, so cool and pleasant, had never seemed so far away… and still I didn’t have the slightest idea of how a man like Blocker thought, or what he meant when he said the things he said. I knew that he admired me and held me in contempt at the same time, but I had no idea why he felt either way. And you don’t need to care, darling, Elizabeth spoke up suddenly inside my mind. Dolan is your business. Remember Dolan.
“Why do you want to do that?” I asked at last.
He looked back at me then, and I saw he was both furious and amused. But the fury was the emotion on top, I think. “What is it with you, bubba? What do you think I am?”
“I don’t…”
“You think I want to kill you for your fucking watch? That what you think?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you are. Sorriest little motherfucker I ever saw.”
I put my great-granddad’s watch away.
“You ain’t never gonna be strong, bubba. Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some wither up and die. You dyin. You know you are, and still you won’t move into the shade. Why? Why you pulling this crap on your system?”
“I’ve got my reasons.”
“Yeah, I bet you do. And God help anyone who gets in your way.
He got up and walked off.
Tinker came over, grinning.
“You think you can learn to run a front-end loader?”
“I think so,” I said.
“I think so, too,” he said. “Ole Blockhead there likes you – he just don’t know how to say so.”
“I noticed.”
Tink laughed. “Tough little motherfucker, ain’t you?”
“I hope so,” I said.
I spent the rest of the summer driving a front-end loader, and when I went back to school that fall, almost as black as Tink himself, the other teachers stopped laughing at me. Sometimes they looked at me out of the corners of their eyes after I passed, but they had stopped laughing.
I’ve got my reasons. That’s what I told him. And I did. I did not spend that season in hell just on a whim. I had to get in shape, you see. Preparing to dig a grave for a man or a woman may not require such drastic measures, but it was not just a man or woman I had in mind.
It was that damned Cadillac I meant to bury.
By April of the following year I was on the State Highway Commission’s mailing list. Every month I received a bulletin called Nevada Road Signs. I skimmed most of the material, which concerned itself with pending highway improvement bills, road equipment that had been bought and sold, State Legislature action on such subjects as sand-dune control and new anti-erosion techniques. What I was interested in was always on the last page or two of the bulletin. This section, simply titled The Calendar, listed the dates and sites of roadwork in each coming month. I was especially interested in sites and dates followed by a simple four-letter abbreviation: RPAV. This stood for repaving, and my experience on Harvey Blocker’s crew had showed me that these were the operations which most frequently called for detours. But not always – no indeed. Closing a section of road is a step the Highway Commission never takes unless there is no other choice. But sooner or later, I thought, those four letters might spell the end for Dolan. Just four letters, but there were times when I saw them in my dreams: RPAV.