Parts of the grass have been dug up by whatever tires the
door belonged to. Some drunk kid, entitled as fuck I’d say, drink, drive and
donuts. Either way the van city government are charging him for the repair work.
We start at picking the tread marks, Andore asks if we’d be better off using
the Stripper. Lucas doesn’t respond. Politely he asks again. No reply. I smile
at the new guy and throw eyes to the skies.
“The
community asked us to do this slow, charge by the hour” Lucas says “teach the
little piglet a lesson.”
He
stands by the car door and lights a fag. He doesn’t lift a pick. Sweat beads
and rolls over my brows, stinging my eyes. I drop the pick and walk to the
truck to get some water, I screw the top off and down some.
“Who
said you could have a break?!” Lucas shouts.
“Thought
you wanted to do it slow.” I yell back.
Birdman
stops picking and looks at me, biting his bottom lip to stop the laughter.
Andore looks to Lucas, Remy keeps at the job. Lucas walks over to me carrying
his bulk with clenched fists to the side. He stops a foot from me and stares,
he grabs the water bottle from me and unscrews the top slowly. He begins drinking,
water streaming down his heavy jowls. He keeps his eyes on me, head slanted
until every drop is gone. He screws the top back on, hands me the bottle and glares.
“Back
to work” he says.
I go
back to work.
My arms
start burning, heat rising off my biceps. Everything starts to hurt. Whenever I
try to stop for a breath Lucas eyes me. Cumbersome isn’t the word at all. Lucky
to get through ten inches in ten minutes. I start to see shapes in the ruffled
dirt, people wrapped around one another, faces. Sweat dripping into tiny
puddles beneath me, my breath heavy. I start to think about my childhood, ice
cream lining my knuckles, da giving me maths grinds. He used to put me on his
back in the pool before I could swim, holding on in the deep end. Floating. A
cool breeze shushes somewhere behind my eyes. I feel the pick axe in my hand,
my fingers calloused on the wood. An extension. I breathe in the leaves, the trees,
the mark of the treads. Something is about to happen, I’m about to lift off the
ground or be sucked into it and then Lucas shouts fifteen minutes and it’s
break and I snap out. All the way out. Lucas walks to his truck, he never eats
with us.
“You
doing okay Irish?” Birdman asks.
“What’s
the deal with Lucas?”
“He’s
got a mood thing, don’t take it personally. He feels worse about that then you
do.”
“You
should have seen him before he kicked the drink.” Andore says.
“He was
a fucking demon.”
Someone
asks Remy what he did back in Montreal and to be fair the chap gives us the
best answer ever. A Pedobaiter.
“What
the fuck is that?” I ask.
“I
would set up fake facebooks” his French Canadian accent is weak now “be a
fifteen year old boy or whatever. Get them to say some weird shit and then tell
them to put a grand in my account or I’d send all the shit they said to me to
their families.”
No one
says a thing.
“Snagged
a cop by mistake, had to get out of Montreal.”
The
door on the truck opens, fifteen minutes isn’t a lot. He walks towards us. His
torn dungarees caught in a mild breeze. We walk towards the pick axes,
horizontal beside the treads. Lucas hands me a water bottle as I walk and nods.
There is something terribly desperate in the way he looks at me, like a dog that
shit the bed. Thanks I say and drink. He walks away before I can hand him the
bottle.
It’s
mine now.
No comments:
Post a Comment