Workin' Man (Page 1 of 1)

With 30 40-pound bags of concrete in the back of my little truck, I was nearly doing a wheelie on the way out of Lowe’s. I punched the hazard lights button — flick-flick, flick-flick — pulled my hat down low, hung my left elbow out the window to tan, and drove home — load too heavy — like a sheets-in-the-wind sailboat.  

Thirty-five was my max speed; anything over that and my ’95 Nissan felt like it might cough and spit off the wheels.

A line of traffic formed behind me, but I didn’t care: I’d just drilled 29 holes, each two-feet deep, in my backyard with a gas-powered auger. For two hours, the machine had rattled my teeth and tried to tear my arms loose from my shoulders. I’d hunkered in an awkward crouch, the sun beating down and reddening my neck as the corkscrew dove into the earth like it was hell-bent for China. I had mud caked up my legs like earthen shinguards. My shirt was wet with sweat. Blisters were blossoming on my palms, one of them just under the right middle finger that I considered waving at the jerk behind me even filling up with wine colored blood.

“So by God,” I thought, “if I need to drive slowly, I will.” As far as I was concerned, I’d earned the right to drive like a turtle, to walk shirtless into the Exxon for a Mountain Dew, to whistle at the ladies on the Aubrey’s patio… if that’s what I felt like doing.

Back home, I set to the arduous task of mixing quick-setting concrete: The low-back heave of the sack into the wheelbarrow, the shovel-bust of the bottom, the yank of the bag — leaving a cloud of grey dust — and then the spray of the hose. Next, there’s the rake and the dig-in, shoulders low and burning, and the mix, and the mix and the mix…

Thirty bags, 29 fence posts to set for the length of chain link I needed to enclose my backyard — I was out with a headlamp at 11 p.m., wondering if the neighbors were wondering about me.

And you should know, if you don’t already, there is no beer like the workin’ man’s beer.  Cold, your cracked and red-tipped fingers hugging the can for its moisture, it goes down like water, like air, like sleep: As good as it was, I’m not entirely sure I finished it — I slept like a man unburdened, like a backseat kid on the drive home from a week at the beach.

Except by midmorning the next day, the sun was already glazing the earth and I still had fittings to set, tension wire to string, top rails to line up. I had to drill holes in the side of my house and pin down a post to marry to the walk-through gate latch. I had to go knees-down and hand-scoop a posthole that had caved in during the night.

The violence of the auger digging was behind me; the hump and the strain of the concrete stirring was over, but I was still baking in the sun and my fingers were losing skin like a birch tree.

And I never shook the thought that there are people — millions of them — who make their living this way, who day-in and day-out step from bed in the alarm-buzz darkness, back-sore and finger-nubbed, and set out, coffee steaming, for another day of digging holes (or the metaphorical equivalent).

They build our houses and they pour down our roads. They roof our schools and they side our grocery stores. They rotate our 40,000-mile tires and they tighten the bolts that keep them on our cars.

All this infrastructure structuring, for minimal pay, for maximal expense: Imagine now the man who piled the bricks that go around your front door. Imagine how intimate he became with the shape and the size of your main port of entry. He probably knows of electrical outlets that you haven’t even found yet.

Now imagine this same man — he’s sore in the shoulders and two days bearded — and he’s at the grocery store and he’s blinking at a gallon of milk and he’s thinking about his young daughter at home and how she needs her calcium and how he could skip lunch tomorrow so she won’t have to.

But I get carried away. Excuse me. I was telling you about the backyard fence I was building to keep in my new Labrador Retriever puppy:

I was balancing the top-rail beams when my little neighbor boy wandered over with a bottle of cold water for me. In his turned-up T-shirt he carried something.

“Whatta ya got there?” I asked him.

“Aw nothin’,” he said and dumped out two plastic wrestling figures.

Then he sprinted back to his house, leaving me with two Speedo-ed toys at my feet. But soon he was back with a camping chair and he unfolded it in the shade of a tree and started talking.

“Who was your favorite wrestler when you were my age?”

“Oh man,” I said. “Definitely The Hulkster!”

He smiled and picked up his chair and moved along with me as I worked down the fenceline.

“Did you know there’s a child molester who lives down the street?” he asked me. “My dad looked it up online.”

“Scary, huh?” I said.

“No. I’d shoot him with my pellet gun if he even touched my hand. Either that or I’d stab him with my survival knife.”

“You got a survival knife?”

“Yeah. It has matches, fishing line and a compass!”

“Awesome!” I said.

The boy’s mom came out into her backyard and called his name.

“He’s over here,” I called back.

“Is he bothering you?”

“Not at all.”

And then, in the sunshine midday silence, the little boy stood up and hollered out: “Mom, when Ben gets through with his fence, can he come over and play with me?”