Tomorrow was Saturday... sorry, today. Today was Saturday. Dolan was coming on Sunday. No time.
Yes, my darling.
The blast had torn her to pieces.
My darling had been torn to pieces for telling the truth to the police about what she had seen, for refusing to be intimidated, for being brave, and Dolan was still driving around in his Cadillac and drinking twenty-year-old Scotch while his Rolex glimmered on his wrist.
I’ll try, I thought, and then I fell into a dreamless sleep that was like death.
I woke up with the sun, already hot at eight o’clock, shining in my face. I sat up and screamed, my throbbing hands flying to the small of my back. Work? Cut up another fourteen chunks of asphalt? I couldn’t even walk.
But I could walk, and I did.
Moving like a very old man on his way to a shuffleboard game, I worked my way to the glove compartment and opened it. I had put a bottle of Empirin there in case of such a morning after.
Had I thought I was in shape? Had I really?
Well! That was quite funny, wasn’t it?
I took four of the Empirin with water, waited fifteen minutes for them to dissolve in my stomach, and then wolfed a breakfast of dried fruit and cold Pop-Tarts.
I looked over to where the compressor and the jackhammer waited. The yellow skin of the compressor already seemed to sizzle in the morning sunshine. Leading up to it on either side of my incision were the neatly cut squares of asphalt.
I didn’t want to go over there and pick up that jackhammer. I thought of Harvey Blocker saying, You ain’t never gonna be strong, bubba. Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some wither up and die... Why you pulling this crap on your system?
“She was in pieces,” I croaked. “I loved her and she was in pieces.”
As a cheer it was never going to replace “Go, Bears!” or “Hook em, horns!” but it got me moving. I siphoned gas from the van’s tank, gagging at the taste and the stink, holding onto my breakfast only by a grim act of will. I wondered briefly what I was going to do if the road-crew had drained the diesel from their machines before going home for the long weekend, and quickly shoved the thought out of my mind. It made no sense to worry over things I couldn’t control. More and more I felt like a man who has jumped out of the bay of a B-52 with a parasol in his hand instead of a parachute on his back.
I carried the gasoline can over to the compressor and poured it into the tank. I had to use my left hand to curl the fingers of my right around the handle of the compressor’s starter-cord. When I pulled, more blisters broke, and as the compressor started up, I saw thick pus dripping out of my fist.
Never make it.
Please darling.
I walked over to the jackhammer and started it again.
The first hour was the worst, and then the steady pounding of the jackhammer combined with the Empirin seemed to numb everything – my back, my hands, my head. I finished cutting out the last block of asphalt by eleven. It was time to see how much I remembered of what Tinker had told me about jump-starting road equipment.
I went staggering and flapping back to my van and drove a mile and a half down the road to where the road construction was going on. I saw my machine almost at once: a big Case-Jordan bucket-loader with a grapple-and-pincers attachment on the back. $135,000 worth of rolling stock. I had driven a Caterpillar for Blocker, but this one would be pretty much the same.
I hoped.
I climbed up into the cab and looked at the diagram printed on the head of the stick-shift. It looked just the same as the one on my Cat. I ran the pattern once or twice. There was some resistance at first because some grit had found its way into the gearbox – the guy who drove this baby hadn’t put down his sand-flaps and his foreman hadn’t checked him. Blocker would have checked. And docked the driver five bucks, long weekend or not.
His eyes. His half-admiring, half-contemptuous eyes. What would he think of an errand like this?
Never mind. This was no time to be thinking of Harvey Blocker; this was a time to be thinking of Elizabeth. And Dolan.
There was a piece of burlap on the steel floor of the cab. I lifted it, looking for the key. There was no key there, of course.
Tink’s voice in my mind: Shit, a kid – could jump – start one of these babies, whitebread. Ain’t nothin to it. At least a car’s got a ignition lock on it – new ones do, anyway. Look here. No, not where the key goes, you ain’t got no key, why you want to look where the key goes? Look under here. See these wires hangin down?
I looked now and saw the wires hanging down, looking just as they had when Tinker pointed them out to me: red, blue, yellow, and green. I pared the insulation from an inch of each and then took a twist of copper wire from my back pocket.
Okay, whitebread, lissen up ’cause we maybe goan give Q and A later, you dig me? You gonna wire the red and the green. You won’t forget that, ’cause it’s like Christmas. That takes care of your ignition.
I used my wire to hold the bare places on the red and green wires of the Case-Jordan’s ignition together. The desert wind hooted, thin, like the sound of someone blowing over the top of a soda bottle. Sweat ran down my neck and into my shirt, where it caught and tickled.
Now you just got the blue and the yellow. You ain’t gonna wire em; you just gonna touch em together and you gonna make sho you ain’t touchin no bare wire wither own self when you do it neither, “less you wanna make some hot electrified water in your jockeys, m’man. The blue and the yellow the ones turn the starter. Off you go. When you feel like you had enough of a joyride, you just pull the red and green wires apart. Like turnin off the key you don’t have.
I touched the blue and yellow wires together. A big yellow spark jumped up and I recoiled, striking the back of my head on one of the metal posts at, the rear of the cab. Then I leaned forward and touched them together again. The motor turned over, coughed, and the bucket-loader took a sudden spasmodic lurch forward. I was thrown into the rudimentary dashboard, the left side of my face striking the steering bar. I had forgotten to put the damned transmission in neutral and had almost lost an eye as a result. I could almost hear Tink laughing.
I fixed that and then tried the wires again. The motor turned over and turned over. It coughed once, puffing a dirty brown smoke signal into the air to be torn away by the ceaseless wind, and then the motor just went on cranking. I kept trying to tell myself the machine was just in rough shape – man who’d go off without putting the sand-flaps down, after all, was apt to forget anything – but I became more and more sure that they had drained A the diesel, just as I had feared.
And then, just as I was about to give up and look for something I could use to dipstick the loader’s fuel tank (all the better to read the bad news with, my dear), the motor bellowed into life.
I let the wires go – the bare patch on the blue one was smoking – and goosed the throttle. When it was running smoothly, I geared it into first, swung it around, and started back toward the long brown rectangle cut neatly into the westbound lane of the highway.
The rest of the day was a long bright hell of roaring engine and blazing sun. The driver of the Case-Jordan had forgotten to mount his sand-flaps, but he had remembered to take his sun umbrella. Well, the old gods laugh sometimes, I guess. No reason why. They just do. And I guess the old gods have a twisted sense of humor.