‘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.’
‘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.
Not that it would be easy, or perhaps even soon — I knew I might have to wait for years, and that someone else might get Dolan in the meantime. He was an evil man, and evil men live dangerous lives. Four loosely related vectors would have to come together, like a rare conjunction of the planets: travel for Dolan, vacation time for me, a national holiday, and a three-day weekend.
Years, maybe. Or maybe never. But I felt a kind of serenity — a surety that it would happen, and that when it did I would be prepared. And eventually it did happen. Not that summer, not that fall, and not the following spring. But in June of last year, I opened Nevada Road Signs and saw this in The Calendar: