The World Played Chess (10)

“I’ll get a pair,” I said.

Todd flicked his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “You got a pair.”

He walked to the front of the house, and I noticed he had a bowlegged gait, a cocky strut. Maybe he was trying to intimidate me? I deduced I should follow, though for what reason I did not know. Todd pointed to the busted-up concrete that had once been the driveway. I looked more closely. The chunks were about four inches thick. “You see that pile?”

“Sure,” I said.

“I need it in the back, in the foundation trench.”

Sounded easy enough.

Todd walked up the driveway to a gold-colored Chevy stepside truck and pulled a sledgehammer from the bed. Maybe not that easy. He handed me the sledgehammer, and I followed him into the backyard. He pointed to the trench Mike and William worked in. I noticed pieces of gray steel, maybe half an inch in diameter, bent and tied with wire to create a cage-like structure.

“The cement goes in there. No piece bigger than about this.” Todd held up his hand and made a three-inch-diameter circle with his thumb and index finger. I was beginning to get the picture. No, not easy at all.

“You understand?”

I did. “Sure.”

“Backfill the foundation under the rebar.”

“Rebar?” I asked.

The corner of Todd’s lip lifted again. Amused. “Ask William. I need it done by end of today.”

I tried not to blanch.

He looked down at my shoes, then back at my face with that same bemused smile, but he didn’t say another word. He sauntered through the garage to the truck, pulled himself into the cab, and fired up the engine, which gave a throaty rumble. A blast of black smoke escaped the tailpipe as he backed into the street, staring at me like I was something alien.

Well, crap. I had not anticipated this. Still feeling like hell, I slipped on my gloves and swung the sledgehammer. When the metal hammer hit the concrete, the reverberation and pain extended up my arms to my shoulders and my aching head. All I had managed to do was drive several pieces of the concrete into the dirt.

Someone laughed. William and Mike stood in the garage watching. After a moment William said, “You’re not going to get far like that.” He walked over. “Build a platform with those two big pieces over there.”

The chunks he pointed to were flat and about a foot in length and width. I put them together. “You put a smaller piece on there.” William did so. “Then let the hammer do the work.” He swung it, and the hammer splintered the concrete into smaller rocks. “Otherwise you’ll wear out in an hour. You got it?”

“I got it,” I said.

Unfortunately, the bending and lifting in the summer sun made me nauseated and dizzy. I stepped around the garage to the side yard and threw up what little I had in my stomach. Mike and William found amusement in my misery, but Mike handed me a plastic bottle of water the second time I walked back from the side of the house. I got a routine down and learned how to let the weight of the sledgehammer do the brunt of the work. When I had a pile of rock, I shoveled it into a wheelbarrow and pushed it into the backyard, tipping the contents into the trench. After that first load, I felt like the job would take days, not hours.

Mike and William remained busy but would occasionally stop to give me a hard time.

“You’re working on the chain gang now, Vincenzo,” William would say. “Swing that sledgehammer, son.”

The afternoon sun beat on me. The more water I drank, the more I perspired. I had never perspired so much, not even playing sports. I took off my sweatshirt, then my shirt. Both were drenched. With my olive complexion, I didn’t worry about a sunburn, and with my lack of knowledge, skin cancer would not enter my thoughts until thirty-some years later when my father was diagnosed with melanoma. I just kept beating on chunks of concrete, like I really was on a chain gang.

At three o’clock William and Mike stopped for a break. We gathered in the garage and I was grateful for the cool shade. I had concrete dust all over my forearms and my chest. I was beat, but I was also eighteen, which meant I had energy and stamina. I also had pride. I had a sense that Todd had given me a shit job thinking I was some entitled kid who would quit. When you’re one of ten, you learn quickly you’re not entitled to anything but the necessities, hand-me-downs, and cars with 157,000 miles on them and the possibility of exploding gas tanks. And I was no kid. I was heading off to college, and I wanted to be treated like a man.

“You smell like a brewery,” William said. He handed me a Coke and squatted low, his butt nearly touching the ground.

Mike and I sat on turned-over five-gallon buckets. William and Mike smoked Marlboros. “Don’t tell your sister,” Mike said. My family had been after him to quit smoking given reports of a correlation between smoking and cancer. He was working on it, but I figured being around another smoker made it too hard to resist. “How’s your head?” Mike asked, and he and William laughed.

I got the sense that had I not come down to the jobsite with Mike after lunch, the task of breaking up the concrete would have fallen to him.

I pointed to the rock in the driveway. “Did you have to do this stuff?”

He shook his head emphatically. “Not a chance. I told you it would be grunt labor.”

“And you’re the grunt.” William blew out a cloud of Marlboro smoke. “Don’t worry about it. I was once the grunt. Todd’s testing you.”