Bart insinuated himself between his two friends. “Knock it off,” he said. “All right? Now just stop this bullshit!”
They’d hardly noticed Bill, who was thudding his way up the roughed-in staircase, shouldering two bags of dry cement on one shoulder, his toolbox clutched in the other hand. At the top of the stairs he stopped and looked at the three men for several moments before walking to the center of the house, where the future fireplace would be, its flue already rising up the structure and out into the big, blue sky.
“You think you’ll have time to finish that by Christmas?” Bart said, motioning toward the hearth.
Bill lowered the cement to the floor and looked at the concrete hearth as if withholding an opinion about a painting he was staring at. “I listen to the rocks,” Bill said flatly. “They tell me where to place them. Sometimes they tell me quickly. . . .” His voice trailed off. “. . . And sometimes they don’t. But it’s a nine-foot ceiling here, so . . . shouldn’t be a problem. I suspect we’ll be done around Thanksgiving, give or take.”
“I don’t know that we’ve been formally introduced to your co-worker,” Cole said.
“José,” Bill said. “Been with me since my back went out in Durango. Forty-foot-tall chimney and my back just quit. I was three stories off the ground, up on scaffolding, and my back seized right up. Couldn’t work for months. José was working as a bricklayer on that project, and I hired him to help me finish the chimney. Been with me ever since.”
It was the most they’d ever heard Bill say.
“How old are you, Bill?” Teddy asked.
“Fifty-one,” the mason said. “And them rocks get heavier every year.”
“Well, we’ll leave you to it,” Cole said.
But Bill was already turned away from them, peering into the pile of rocks, his hands turning each rock over and over, looking at them from every conceivable angle.
Cole and Teddy moved on then and took measurements of where the kitchen island would be while Bart stood rooted there, watching Bill. Something about what the mason had said, about the rocks getting heavier, struck a chord that reverberated deep within him. Because what his partners didn’t know, couldn’t have known, was that Bart wasn’t sure he wanted to do this work anymore, wasn’t sure that he could keep going even another couple of years.
* * *
—
Five months before, they’d been working on a project, a teardown-rebuild of a deck, when he’d injured not just one but both knees. It had been an icy morning, and he was humping a load of two-by-fours up an asphalt driveway when he lost his footing and, afraid to drop the load or dent one of the nearby vehicles, buckled his knees while his feet skated in opposite directions. He’d felt the tearing, knew that real damage had been done, and was furious with himself. So, he simply lay there, on that icy pavement, embarrassed, as he mentally prepared himself to stand. Only he could not—he could not stand—his knees, sirens of pain.
Eventually, he was able to right himself and, standing gingerly, pick up his fallen load. For the rest of the day, he moved like an invalid, making excuses to stay near the porch and work there, rather than retrieve supplies or even take a break for lunch.
That same night he called an ex-girlfriend, a woman named Margo whom he had actually loved, or nearly loved, but who wisely sensed in him some innate weakness (call it immaturity, perhaps; call it addiction). A nurse who also moonlighted as a Pilates instructor, she found him in his bed.
“Bart, I haven’t heard from you for at least a month now,” she began, leaning on the doorframe leading into his bedroom. “I thought we weren’t even doing this anymore.” But he was sweating profusely, and she saw then the pain etched on his face. Bart was many things, but he was not prone to complaint or exaggeration.
“Jesus,” she said, approaching the bed, “what’s wrong?”
“My knees,” he hissed, pulling back the bedsheets.
His legs were grotesquely swollen, the kneecaps hidden under flesh that had puffed up and gone purple.
“Oh, my god,” Margo breathed. “Bart, we’ve got to get you to a hospital.”
“No, no, no,” he protested. “Can’t do that. Please.”
“How come?”
“Look, I just fell,” he said. “I was wondering if maybe you could look at it, though. Maybe tell me what’s wrong?”
“You need to get yourself to a hospital, okay? Look, Bart, don’t be stupid. Now, what happened?”
He explained as she rose to get him a glass of cold water and a handful of ibuprofen and then sat with him on the side of the bed.
“Thank you,” he said. “I know it’s been a while. I didn’t mean to bother you, but . . . you were the first person I thought to call.”
She sat back, surprised by his last statement, then ran her hands down his knees, applying pressure with her fingertips and watching for his reactions.
“My guess is you tore some ligaments,” she said. “Not your ACL, thankfully, but . . . you might have some significant tearing in both MCLs and maybe LCLs.”
“Is that bad?”
“Uh, yeah, Bart; it is. It’d be one thing if you were a desk jockey shuffling paper for a living, but your line of work? You’re going to be in a lot of pain. I mean, your knees might heal on their own, but probably not.” She sighed. “Let me guess: no insurance?”
He shook his head.
“Obamacare?”
He shot her a look.
“And that’s why we’re not still dating,” she said, smirking smartly. “In a nutshell.”
She stood up from his bedside.
“What can I do?” he asked.
“I don’t know. Rest, maybe? You can ice it. The hippies swear by their CBD oils.”
“If I wanted CBD,” Bart said, “I’d smoke a joint.”
She leaned down and gave his unshaven cheek a slow kiss.
“Too bad,” she whispered into his ear. “Other than those knees, you’re still looking pretty good. Might have been able to convince me.”
But the pain was so sharp, and his body so tired, that this was the single time in his entire life when he had actually chosen not to make love to a woman. Even as she began to kiss her way down his neck, he thought for a moment about making it work, and as she straddled his body and began to pull off her shirt, he tried his level best to ignore the pain and just focus on how good it might feel. But nothing would erase the pain shooting up and down his legs.
He lightly touched her elbows as her fingers worked to remove her bra.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. “I can’t. I really, really, really wish I could. . . . But I can’t. Sorry, Margo.”
She stared down at him. “You’re really hurt, aren’t you?” she asked.
“Yes, Margo. I’m really fucking hurt.”
She shrugged back into her shirt, pecked him again on the cheek, and left.
For the next several weeks he went about his work, hobbled and almost always high; OxyContin helped, but the accompanying nausea was enough to make him swerve back toward weed, which became the only solace he found. Waking early, he would lie in bed, smoking a joint as he watched the weather forecast and dreading the moment he’d slowly swing his beleaguered legs out from beneath the blankets and set his feet on the floor. Simply standing took heroic effort.
Then, come evening, when he returned to the apartment, removing his boots and clothing would take ten or twelve tortured minutes, after which he would plod naked to the bathtub, there to soak for an hour as he puffed away, listening to Bob Marley and dozing off until the sudsy water finally cooled, the joint disappeared into sodden ash, and he roused himself to dry off, shuffled toward the kitchen, and cooked a little pot of Campbell’s soup. Sleep, when it came, was like a velvet mallet to the head, an almost instantaneous knockout, like falling down the shaft of a thousand-foot-deep mine into c
omplete darkness. There were nights when Bart’s only true experience of happiness was that fraction of a second before his eyes truly drooped shut, when the promise of sleep enveloped him like the dark wings of a gargoyle, sealing off the rest of the world—goodnight.
* * *
—
Christ, the hours and days run together,” Bart said, sometime after lunch as they unloaded a truck of its freight of two-by-fours.
“I know it,” said Cole. “I’ve got about four hundred emails stacked up I haven’t even glanced at, fucking twenty-four voicemails, and my soon-to-be ex-wife wants to get together for some kind of ‘goodbye dinner.’ Sent me probably thirty texts before I finally replied.”
“When’s that?”
“Uh, Saturday night,” Cole said. “Wait—isn’t that tonight?”
“You’re asking the wrong guy.”
“Teddy!” Cole yelled.
Teddy sat inside the cab of the truck, staring back at them in the rearview mirror. “What?”
“What’s today?”
“The twenty-fourth, I think. Kodi’s got a 4H meeting tonight.”
“Christ, Teddy-Bear, I mean, what day of the fucking week is it?”
“Saturday, remember. You’re always busting my ass about working the weekend, and now you can’t even recollect that it’s a Saturday. Why?”
“Shit,” Cole said. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.”
“Now who’s ducking out early?” Bart asked, smiling devilishly.
* * *
—
They waited for what few subs had reported for work that day to collect their tools before quitting, and then Cole, Bart, and Teddy cleaned up the worksite, locked the temporary “front door” that led into an entryway-mudroom off the garage, and walked on down the slope toward their trucks.
“Bill ever say anything to you guys?” Bart asked Teddy. “I mean, after this morning, when we said hello.”
“Not a word,” Cole said. “Just kept moving rocks up into the house.”
“Goddamn spy,” Bart said. “He’s keeping an eye on us. Every move we make. Might be worthwhile to whisper something to the subs, case anyone thinks about lighting a joint on the site or, hell, cracking into a damn beer. That barbecue was one thing, but I bet that sumbitch don’t approve of fun-loving as a habit.”
Cole and Bart slumped into Cole’s truck.
“Fuck,” Cole said, “I’m really not looking forward to tonight.”
“Ah, it’ll be great.” Bart laughed. “Least there’s no pressure to pick up the check, right?”
11
He could not say how long it had been since he’d last seen her, and he’d forgotten how beautiful she was. Half-Mexican, half-Irish, with long black hair and dark, dark eyes, she was sitting on a tall stool by herself when he entered the restaurant’s bar. She was compact, a firecracker of a woman, with short, thick legs, wide hips, and an achingly narrow waistline. Twirling an olive in an already empty martini glass, she was decked out in tall leather boots, a short black skirt, and a turquoise sleeveless blouse that showed off her tanned and toned arms. He was unsure if all this was meant to rub his nose in the fact of their impending divorce, or something else. Either way, he was too tired to be played for a fool. He leaned into the bar, leaving a whole stool between them before ordering a beer.
“What’s this? Christ, Cole, you don’t have to be afraid,” she said, patting the empty stool that separated them. “Come on. Come sit next to me like a normal person.”
She’d always had that throaty voice that just undid him. He worked hard to pretend that instead of warmly welcoming him, she’d just called him a shit-for-brains meathead. The beer arrived, and he raised his glass at her in a bittersweet, half-mocking toast. “To new directions,” he said.
“Oh, come on,” she said, leaning toward him, her cleavage suddenly dominating his field of vision. “Don’t be so dramatic.”
He took a long swallow of beer.
“What do you want?”
She glanced down at the bar, her hair falling around her face. Wait a minute, he thought. What, is she . . . ? She cannot be crying. Not after all she’s put me through. Goddamn it.
“Cristina?”
“I don’t know.”
He took another pull of beer. “Don’t know what?”
“There are moments I miss you, Cole. We had some good times, right?”
He took a long, long drink from his glass of beer and felt the alcohol quickly work its way through his dehydrated system. Felt the sunburn on his nose, neck, and ears.
She glanced up at him, her makeup already gently smudged.
He thought about Bill, how few words the man elected to utter; decided this might be an excellent argumentative tactic to utilize with Cristina. Maybe she’d think he’d matured. And so he focused on that, on simply being quiet, on enjoying his beer. He pretended she wasn’t there at all. He glanced outside the bar and grimaced. The darkness out there meant he’d be back at the site soon enough; every minute he spent away from the house felt like a penalty he’d suffer in those December days leading up to their deadline.
“At least we didn’t have any kids,” she said, offering a small, hopeful laugh.
“I always wanted to make a baby with you, actually,” he confessed. “Maybe if we had, things would’ve been different.”
“Oh, Coley,” she sighed. “I was never going to have a baby with you. At least, not until you grew up a little bit.”
She reached for her purse and collapsed the distance between them, moving onto the stool he’d intended as a kind of barricade. She was wearing a new perfume, one he didn’t recognize, all citrus and flowers; it reminded Cole of their honeymoon in Jamaica, and he was suddenly caught up in a spell of memories: fucking in the airplane’s bathroom at thirty-two thousand feet, drinking rum-cream out of her tight belly button and sucking her toes while sitting on their hotel room’s little porch and looking out at the ocean while it rained, Cristina handing him a hot cup of coffee in nothing but her underwear and then crawling into his lap and reading him her beloved García Márquez. . . .
He took another sip of beer, and then another, and finally drained the glass and threw a twenty-dollar bill on the bar.
“Come on,” he said, and took her hand.
“Where are we going?” she asked, more than a touch of curiosity in her voice.
“Out of here.”
“Oh,” she breathed, grabbing her purse.
* * *
—
Long before they reached the front door, her legs were wrapped around his waist and his hands cupped her breasts. With the keys dangling from the lock, he nudged the door open with his shoulder, and they made it as far as the living room couch, into which he collapsed, Cristina still straddling him while she tore off her blouse. Her breasts were astonishingly pale where the Nevada sun had been blocked by a bikini top, and for a moment, she pressed her arm beneath them, pushing them up high, and tighter together. He pressed his face into her nipples and inhaled. For a moment he was disorientated, felt like he’d returned to their home with a stranger. Then went with it.
“Oh, fuck,” she said huskily. “Ohhh . . . fuck.” She unzipped his pants.
He went very light-headed for a moment and realized he hadn’t had an orgasm in several months . . . maybe half a year. She was bouncing on him now, up and down, and he was simply staring at her tits, his hands fixed on her hips, which he truly did love more than anything else in the world, the way her muscles and flesh swelled out there, so firm and unapologetically curvy.
“No,” he said, flipping her onto her stomach, raising her skirt, and moving her underwear to the side.
“Jesus,” she sighed. “Oh, Jesus, don’t you ever fucking stop.”
* * *
—
He woke up in the early morning, we
ll before dawn, and walked into the bathroom, where he sat down on the toilet, if for no other reason than to think. He glanced out a little window at the moon, made his hand into the shape of a pistol, and fired a few rounds at the little white bull’s-eye up there. His body felt like a frayed electrical wire. Yes, he felt better for the night with Cristina; yes, the sex was welcome; yes, he missed holding her in bed, her face on his chest, his fingers in her hair; and no, he didn’t really want to be divorced. . . . But his muscles throbbed, his fingers so sore they were often bunched into painful fists, his head felt blurry, and somewhere out there, miles off beneath that same moon, Gretchen’s house waited for them, imperious in its continued demands.
He showered, made a pot of coffee, and saw on the kitchen table the divorce papers, a little yellow Post-it note reading: Please sign these? XOXO, C. He looked back into their bedroom, taking her in, unsure whether a future with Gretchen was a complete daydream, the fantasy of a blue-collar roughneck trying to climb his way up an impossibly high ladder.
He signed the papers where they were marked for him, all at once feeling officially untethered and very, very desolate. After all those years, he was single again. And that was that.
* * *
—
The mountains made the night darker, blocked even the starlight, hid the moon and the coming dawn, and in that deep, nestled darkness Cole left his truck parked beside Bart’s, trudging toward the house with his tool belt draped over one shoulder, a Thermos of coffee thumbed from the hand supporting it, and in the other, a bag of quickly cooling McDonald’s.
The house was already partially lit, and as he crossed the bridge, he recognized the sound of Jimi Hendrix on guitar: the first few licks of “Hey Joe.” He could see shadows in the house moving, dancing, and Bart’s voice was there, too, singing—all of that sound echoing off the cliffs.
Inside the house Cole called out, “Bart? Bart, you here?”
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