The Unexpected and Fictional Career Change of Jim Kearns
Chapter 5
Naturally, every action, right down to the smallest, has its repercussions. Even a deed as innocent as pulling an old shoebox from a living room side table can carry more weight than you’d think.
It happened to me a while ago. I’m not even sure what I was doing, killing time, looking for old photos, or what, but in the box I discovered a stash of dated bills and Visa receipts. A decade old and totally useless, they nevertheless gripped me as I thumbed through them.
They scared me for a moment, too; as I stared at a gas receipt for twenty dollars (and that in itself speaks of ancient history), the only thing linking me to it was my signature — and even that had changed over the years.
Beneath the gas receipt lay a sales slip from Discount Boots, 587 Queen Street West, from that same year. It was for a pair of Kodiak work boots, steel toe and shank, green patch on the ankle, $39.95. I couldn’t tell you what unfolded in the world that year, whether or not Los Angeles rioted or Nelson Mandela became president of South Africa, but the receipt for those boots, physical articles that I could remember, opened a gateway to my history, reminding me of what had unfolded in my life at that particular time.
That summer had been hot (and no, not redundantly so, like the night was dark), hot the way this summer is hot, the way most memorable summers seem to be hot — relentless and dry, searing the grass and sucking up the city’s water supply. In my profession you dread those times, the sheer misery, keeping up the liquids but not overdoing the salt tablets (so you don’t find yourself retching in the bushes by three o’clock in the afternoon). And to make matters worse, Defazio Bros. had landed a contract, along with four other companies, for resurfacing the walkways and common areas of all public secondary schools in the metro area with paving stones; it was a mammoth commitment, and we had to put in fifty-hour-plus weeks despite the heat.
By July we had two crews working together at Bathurst Collegiate, Constantine Sousa’s and mine. Middle-aged and balding, Constantine’s sloped shoulders and knotted arms exuded power, his biceps swelling to the size of grapefruits under a load of stone; even his belly, round and sizable, seemed rock-hard and didn’t sway or sag as he bent over in his linesman’s stance to lay brick. He had a saying as to how the pavers should go down: “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, just follow the line and break your back.”
An old-world sort of guy, Constantine looked forward to putting in five or ten more years then moving west to Victoria, where the weather was more comparable with Portugal’s, and settling into a cottage-style house with his wife. But until then, he was satisfied to do his time, trading an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay.
Constantine’s crew was fully Portuguese: the two Manuels, middle-aged and skilled like Constantine, and Joe Castro, at twenty years old the shovel of the group but learning something new every day. At lunchtime they’d move off to the side, breaking out their pop bottles filled with a homemade wine/ginger ale mix and snapping open lunch pails stuffed with assorted breads, cheeses, and sausage.
My crew, on the other hand, was far less professional. College students grabbing work between April and September or guys just waiting to find their true calling (I’d fallen into the abyss lurking somewhere between those two groups), they were the type who favored faded blue jeans to work pants or sweats; their T-shirts bore no stains or rips and they left their work boots fashionably unlaced. Twenty years down the road they’d be telling their children how they wouldn’t have lasted a day doing what they (the fathers) had done, toiling like Egyptian slaves beneath an unyielding sun way back when, before the real estate market or whatever had given them the bounty they enjoyed today.
They were, in short, a part-time summer crew, the kind I always seemed to be saddled with, and every day, come noon, one of my guys would troop down the street to the McDonald’s (conveniently located two blocks from the high school on a main thoroughfare) to pick up food for everyone but me — a steadfast brown bagger.
Who knows, maybe that lunchtime routine played a small part in the greater scheme of things, although by no means am I blaming McDonald’s, a much-maligned corporation, for the bizarre turn of events that unfolded that day. Undoubtedly, Constantine’s hour had come and nothing at that juncture in time could have altered the fact.
First of all, the heat alone was dangerous. By two-thirty that afternoon, the lot of us felt drugged, and although it wasn’t Constantine’s call or mine, we probably should have gone home. We moved around the site in various stages of mock labor, walking as if we were treading the bottom of a swimming pool, barely halfway past our daily goal of laying one thousand square feet of paving stones. A stretch of limestone lay before us, already leveled and ready to accept the remaining five hundred square feet.
If not for the heat and the horrible density of our work material, the scene would have been pleasant. The high school itself, urban and in a better part of town, was stately — a sprawl of brick and stone, grass and benches. Full green trees peppered its grounds, keeping us in shade, and no one bothered us. Almost everyone (in this postal code, at least) was at work, at their cottage up north, or sequestered in their house, sipping lemonade and basking in central air.
So we stayed on, lingering, cleaning up the site a bit, until finally Joel Scott made a bold move. Brought in as a general laborer that spring, he’d hardened during the summer and become comfortable with a wheelbarrow — although you could still see his uneasiness with the skill parts of the job, the artisan element, I guess you’d call it. But if you learned how to level the limestone base, or how to lay stone quickly and well, you’d make three bucks an hour more; this was his chance, with no pressure and no one else on the line, to gain some experience — and with it some extra cash before going back to school.
Joel bent over in his lineman’s stance with stacks of brick scattered around him and started slowly. “Clickety-clack, clickety-clack, just follow the line and break your back.”
And that’s all you had to do, really. With a herringbone pattern and a rectangular paver, you just made sure that every second stone, the lead stone parallel to the string you’d laid out in advance, didn’t waver. If you did that, every line in your sidewalk, fire lane, driveway, or patio would end up perfectly straight — theoretically.
Of course, you need experience to lay the stones quickly while not drifting off the line, but Joel was game to learn, with the tip of his tongue poking from between his teeth as he plodded forward. Finally, when he’d laid far enough ahead to allow another man to fill in behind him on the forty-five-degree angle, Constantine moved in. The rest of us stood watching, slightly intrigued by Joel’s decision to take a shot at laying, to see how things would play out between him and Constantine.
The shit hit the fan almost instantly — and almost literally. In a moment of random chance, Joel pivoted as Constantine stretched, both men in their three-point stance as they reached for a stack of stones to lay; and, bad enough that they resembled two dogs checking each other out at the park, Joel chose that exact moment to break thunderous wind, trumpeting a snootful of hot, rank gas directly into Constantine’s face.
A clamor filled the air, with Constantine rearing back, his hands aloft, as if he’d been caught in a furnace explosion. He bellowed, “What the fuck!”
Joel scrambled to his feet simultaneously, babbling, “Oh, Christ! I’m sorry, Constantine. It’s the McDonald’ . . . the shake! I’m lactose intolerant!” He backed up now, his hands also in the air, as if Constantine were going to attack him or whip a gun from his work pants pocket. “It just slipped out,” he continued, then tripped over a stack of bricks.
The two Manuels, both bent over with their hands on their knees, jiggled with laughter. Finally one of them, after dragging a knuckle under one eye to remove a glistening drop, pointed to the two of them.
“Good fucking shot, Joel. Right in the kisser,” he said in his familiar accent.
Of course, the Manuels, slightly older than Constantine and at the same skill level, could get away with their conduct. Joe, as the youngster of the group, could only turn away and study the treetops, his shoulders shimmying as he looked skyward.
And my guys? Well, they knew the pecking order — at least the job-site pecking order. One of them walked over and helped Joel to his feet; the other stood silently, waiting for the scene to play itself out.
And it did, with Joel’s pathetic apologies and the stench of hot sulphur finally fading away. Still, Constantine continued to give him the evil eye, and not because he was a petty man. The incident, as unintentional as it was, had been humiliating (or, as Joe, city-born and anglicized to the brim said to me so succinctly a moment later as we cut open a new skid of bricks: “Accident or not, If you’re going to take one in the teeth like that, it’d better be from a fuckin’ lingerie model while you’re diggin’ in and not from some sweaty-arsed greenhorn in front of the entire crew”).
So an unease settled over the site, which in turn kick-started us. Joel fell into carrying for Constantine, as a kind of unspoken penance for his act, and Constantine laid as only he could, clickety-clack, clickety-clack, moving up the line as fast as he could, possibly attempting to break Joel’s back. I returned from the skid with a handful of bricks and started installing beside Constantine. Before long, the others followed suit, scurrying around purposefully.
By six o’clock we’d completed our thousand square feet, and it looked good — straight and precise, cut in at the edges, and with the level as smooth as a sheet of glass — but the old maxim, as I knew it would, held true. When I tried to stand up straight at the end of the laying spurt, my lower back screamed as if broken (with my hamstrings supplying the harmony). You couldn’t avoid the physiology. The plebes laying down the Appian way twenty-five hundred years ago would have unfurled themselves in that same slow-motion manner at the end of their workday, wincing, pushing up off of their thighs, feeling as if they’d abused muscle tissue so badly it would never straighten out again.
I glanced at Constantine. He remained bent over, too, but something about him looked . . . grievous. Sweat dripped off of him as if he’d been doused with a bucket of water, and all traces of blood had fled his olive complexion. He tried to straighten, wobbled briefly, then pitched forward. With no hint of restraint, his face piled into the freshly laid stone; he kept sliding forward, ripping the skin from his cheek.
I stood up immediately, no longer feeling my back or legs; the seriousness of what had just happened overrode all the small stuff. When a man like Constantine (strong like bull, etc.) drops the way he dropped, you don’t think the worst, you know it. I didn’t bother checking him. I just turned, bolted for the corner pay phone, and punched in 911, figuring every second might count.
I was wrong. Apparently, he’d died before he hit the ground: massive coronary. And thinking back, the events of that day probably did speed things up for him: the heat, the strain, the indignation. But not by much. From all reports, his ticker was ready to blow. It just needed a reason.
Not even a month later, with my crew and me sent to prep a new job site, we sat around on some freshly delivered skids and ate our lunch. It was late August now and felt like it. The sun shed its light at a different angle, the heat had broken by a few degrees, and even the high school in front of us radiated a different mood somehow (as if it, even though obviously inanimate, a mere building, was gearing up to accept its screaming hordes with all their hopes and worries).
Again, my guys scarfed down some kind of fast food, Wendy’s, Burger King, or whatever. We ate quietly, with only the sound of chewing, newspaper rattling, and straw sucking breaking the silence, until Joel lifted one leg off of his skid and squeezed out a moist-sounding blaaattt.
“Oh, shit. Sorry guys,” he said, holding up his milkshake and looking abashed.
I’ll state right now, I’m not sure who commented next. In fact, as much as I’ve tried, I don’t remember either of the other two men’s names, although Jeffery keeps popping up for one of them. In my mind, they were interchangeable, seemingly hard-working but never getting dirty, one blonde and one dark-haired, both back to school in the fall with dreams of becoming chartered accountants, bank managers, or civilians of that stature. Nevertheless, one of them, let’s say Jeffery, spoke: “Y’know, Joel. The police should confiscate that thing before you kill somebody else — just pat you down and take it right out of your pants.”
The other one followed. “Or at least dust it for prints, slap a serial number on it, then make you register it.”
“Hey,” Jeffery added, turning to his friend, “maybe he thinks he’s a rogue superhero, ‘The Human Gas Chamber,’ dealing out his rough and fatal brand of impulsive justice.”
They both guffawed, beaming at their articulation and wit. I looked at Joel. He didn’t find them at all funny.
“Come on, guys. Give it a rest,” I said.
“Oh, oh, just one more!” Jeffery said, sounding like a schoolboy. “How’s this: clickety-clack, clickety-clack, follow the line, just don’t sniff my crack, or you’ll find yourself dead on your ba—”
Joel’s milkshake flew as he leapt from the skid and threw a roundhouse right. Jeffery hunched and took the blow on his upturned shoulder; then, scrambling off of his skid, snarling, with his hands up, the frat boy stood, ready to do battle. But before anything else could unfold, I grabbed Joel and pulled him back.
“Stop it!” I yelled. “The next person to move, or even speak, is fired. They can collect their stuff and go home.”
No one moved or spoke, and I spent the next ten minutes smoothing things over. Good résumé padding, I suppose, being able to mediate on-the-job disputes (although, ironically, look where that particular skill got me). But all the while, as I kept tomorrow’s pillars of the community from each other’s throats, the stupidity of the situation screamed at me. On one side, I tried to calm a man who, when stretching logic to its limit, carried this legacy: he’d killed a guy once, not in a bar fight in Abilene, but with an egg fart while laying paving stones. And on the other side, I tried to reason with the person who’d taunted the egg-fart killer into attacking him — in the process belittling a man I knew and respected, a man who was not yet dead a month.
Ever since I pulled those receipts from that shoebox, dredging old memories with them, I’ve contemplated those characters now and again, wondering if Joel ever truly got over the incident, or if he’d stayed as I saw him when we shook hands on his last day of work back then, smiling slightly to be polite, but looking preoccupied, like a man with something else on his mind.
As for Jeffery (?), what would you even find if you could get into the head of the vacuous? Vast, empty stretches? Constant nattering, the mental equivalent of Styrofoam chips filling those stretches? Me, I, then me again ad infinitum? I don’t know, maybe I’m being unfair. He was twenty years old back then, just filling up with experiences, and that was one of them. I’ve undoubtedly done worse without the benefit of being held responsible — or even learning from it.
Then there’s Constantine, the same age then as I am now and the father of three kids when he handed in his lunch pail. His passing wasn’t mystical or absurd, like a death in a John Irving novel. I’m sure the coroner’s report didn’t list the cause of his death as accidental inhalation of foreign flatulence enhanced by inadvertent rectal proximity; it probably stated something more succinct, like massive myocardial infarction — something I can imagine lurking around any one of my corners.
And, ultimately, that’s the rub, I guess. I am the same age as Constantine was back then; the years in between have vanished — they’re nothing but spent fuel as I sputter towards my latter days.
What have I accomplished in that time?
Nothing. Clickety-clack, clickety-clack is still all I’ve ever earned a living at.
And what have I learned from all of this?
That in the course of this lifetime, the odds of getting ahead don’t necessarily increase — just as the odds of taking one in the face don’t always decrease — with how hard you work.