The hapless kid felt his hands burning as he tried to toss the first scoop of sand, which stuck to the broad shovel and twisted his torso halfway around while his feet stayed firmly planted on the ground. He felt something pop. Not knowing about the acid in wet cement, that night he was dismayed to see the skin sloughing off his hands, leaving patches of wet red meat.
The next morning, he was paralyzed and unable to get off the cot where he slept in his parents’ basement. He yelled, even that exertion giving him agony. His old man came down and lifted him liked a giant baby, cradling his boy as he went upstairs and out to his truck where he managed to sit him upright, mewling, on the passenger seat. He took him to an orthopedist, who eased his son’s pain with a sharp push by the heel of one hand at a spot in the middle of the spine, and a couple of injections that made him feel like he was floating, happy and invulnerable.
Two days later, with some remnants of pain in his back, he was again at work with the cement crew. He needed the job; he needed the money. The asshole foreman gave him no quarter. A specialist member of the crew, an old black man who drank a pint of cheap vodka before starting work at 6 a.m., was always cockeyed when he finished the cement, smoothing the surface with steady hands, never leaving an errant mark. He sat chilling in the shade until it was time for him to do his thing, and watched the kid, grinning.
“You’s a persistent little bastid, ain’t ya?” he said, chuckling.
The kid, his hands thickly wrapped in gauze, took up his shovel and began flinging dry sand, a heavy but much easier task. The day was hot and thick, even at starting time, and the concrete would set just fine without a wet bed to rest on. The work hurt his raw hands under the gauze, but he had suffered worse and carried on. Persistent is right. Nobody’s gonna show me up, and that fat prick will never beat me down.
The old man sucked on his cigar and was proud of the kid he once was. He’d withstood the brutal cement work even with cruelly tortured hands. He had once worked a welding job that took him to Beaver Falls, in Pennsylvania. The task was to repair cracks in a black steel catwalk situated between two massive cement kilns. They were
enormous tubes, 12 feet in diameter, lined with firebrick, each with a surface temperature of 500 degrees, rotating on a tilt. He and three others took turns running from an air-conditioned office onto the catwalk and working on the repair until their shoes smoked. He'd mindlessly picked up a wrench with an ungloved hand and smelled a smell almost sickeningly sweet. The burns took days to heal.
His left hand always sharply pained him. It had been crushed in the working end of a faulty conveyor belt on his scut job in an ice cream factory. The right was his dominant hand.
They weren’t always the worn-out old things he now made do with. And the old woman wasn’t always laboring under a dowager’s hump as she contended with the effects of age until death.
When he was a young man and lonely, he tried meeting women at several bars where he hung out. These barflies rarely looked better than what they were, and one – an army sergeant – sat with him and others at a big table and reached over to give his crotch a stinging squeeze. He politely told her he wasn’t interested.
(To be continued)
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