“Jesus doesn’t care what you do with your body?”
Cheryl takes her time lighting the cigarette. “I make my own decisions,” she says and then heads off, walking all cool because she knows I’m watching.
When she’s gone, I take the long way to the student parking lot, past the south lawn where the cheer team usually practices this time of morning. I like the way their skin flashes through those blue and gold outfits, and I sometimes hang my fingers in the fencing and stare. Today, though, the high kicks and girl tosses seem different. Today their uplifted arms and bright smiles make them look falsely optimistic, and according to my pamphlets, possibly suicidal.
I drive to the gravel pits, where I have them dump a quarter ton of sand in the bed, and then head to our job site in Chandler, my rear tires rubbing the fenders the whole way.
The neighborhood we’re working in has only half walked out of the desert, and the house is one of those sprawling adobe numbers with fat, curved sides and wooden hogan ladders. The guy who owns the place is some hotshot named Treen. I don’t like him, but he wants three hundred feet of pink wall around the lot and a strange, yellow decorative wall out front. This is enough work to carry my father for some time.
I mix mortar while my father, in an open khaki workshirt, eats a doughnut, smokes his rojo, and butters block at the same time, tapping the rows into level with the butt of his trowel. I shovel sand, cement, lime, and dye into the mixer, then polish off a grape soda as I fire the hose nozzle into the spinning drum. It’s funny how the ingredients always refuse to mix for a while. Gray, red, brown, and white flop, clump and clot in the tumbler before finally blending into a smooth, pink mortar.
I crumple the soda can and drop it in the half-finished wall, listening as it jangles its way to the bottom. We throw snack wrappers, smoke packs, fast-food trash, and Hamms beer bottles into the hollows in the wall formed by the holes in the block. I tossed a broken wristwatch into a wall once, and another time, I ditched a stupid paperback I was reading called Battlefield Earth! And somewhere in the city of Phoenix is a wall that holds a lost set of my father’s car keys. Sometimes I imagine people in the future tearing down our walls and trying to figure out who we were by what they find inside.
We both start laying block, and we find a groove, working on opposite sides of the waist-high wall to move faster. We don’t usually work face to face, and for some reason, I start inventing stories, one after another, to try to crack my father up. He must know I’m making it all up, but he keeps laughing, and I can’t fully explain my need to lie. I say I heard on the radio that they switched two monkey’s heads in a lab in Switzerland. I describe how a cocky filmmaker was eaten on “Shark Week.” Leonard Nimoy is secretly buying the space station Mir. There’s a cult of Christian nymphomaniacs recruiting in Tempe, I tell him. They all smoke menthols.
At lunch, we spread our shirts on the ground in the shade of our freshly jointed wall, and we are leaning back to eat burritos and drink beer when Treen comes over. It’s clear he’s been lying on pool furniture by the red lines across the backs of his legs and arms. He’s wearing swim trunks and a sweater in the heat, one so thin and loose I know it costs hundreds of dollars.
Treen eyeballs the beer but says nothing. I can tell he’s more nervous about my father’s tattoos — the red lantern on his shoulder, the blackbird fanning his back, a string of foreign characters down his spine. From here, Treen stares at the golden burst of what is supposed to be a Chinese dragon’s head on Dad’s chest. It always looked more like a goldfish to me.
But there’s not much for Treen to be wary of. My father’s a pretty nice guy who sat on gunboats for about ten years, where he probably battled some serious boredom, engaged the enemy’s tattooists, and then surrendered in general before returning home to leave my mother and me.
“Look,” Treen says and points where we are to build the next section of wall. “My neighbors are shit-heeling me. They said they would pay for half the cost of the wall, and now they’re backing out.”
I try to visualize a shit-heeling.
“They know they’ve got me,” Treen says. “They know I’m going to build the wall anyway. I’m wondering if there’s a way we can make their side of the wall crooked or crappy or something.”
This appeals to my father’s sense of justice. “Sometimes,” he says, “the joints on a wall come out looking smooth and clean. Sometimes they’re uneven and messy.”
“Can you do that, make them crappy?”
“Can do,” my father says.
I think this idea is a mistake. Our walls are solid and true, built to last, not like most you see today, cracking from lack of rebar, skimpy mortar, or thin footings. You only get one chance to build a wall right.
“Was it the color?” I ask Treen.
“What?”
“The neighbors,” I say. “Did they hate the pink?”
“It’s not pink,” Treen says. “It’s called Anasazi Sunset.”
The rest of the day, my father and I work quietly, on opposite sides of a wall we are on tiptoes to finish. I groom my joints, while Dad lets the mortar slop where it may, the two of us running rows until the wall completely outgrows us, and all I can make out of my father is the pitched blade of his trowel. There’s a strange comfort to spending the afternoon a few feet from someone you cannot really hear or see, though I can’t quite explain it. You just know they’re there, even when they don’t seem to be there.
* * *
On Thursday, I sit by Loren in City Hall, and we play more games.
Mr. Doyle has us pull words from a purple velvet bag that looks suspiciously like the kind that come with bottles of Crown Royale, and play a kind of charades. The words begin simple enough. There’s “friend” and “goal.” A man in a suit acts out “share” by holding imaginary objects close to his heart before giving them away to each of us. We receive our invisible gifts with two hands, to prevent spilling.
But the words start to get weird — next come “sacrifice,” “testify,” and “redeem.” My word is stupid. I reach into the fuzzy bag and draw a folded slip that reads “hope.” I have no idea what to do with this.
I walk to the head of the table, and unable to think of any way to convey hope, just stand there in front of those creepy, outward-slanting windows that invite you to fall into the parking lot below.
“Balance,” the old woman shouts.
“Sober,” someone says.
I wave these responses off, but with the sight of my lifted arms comes “wings,” “soar,” and “guardian angel.”
I decide to divide the word into two parts, “hoe” and “pee.” I begin to work my imaginary hoe through crop rows, emphasizing my elbows and the straightness of the tool. I get “garden,” which prompts “grow” and “blossom.”
Loren shouts “weed.”
I try the “pee” part of the formula by tracing an imaginary arc of urine with my little finger, extending it from my crotch out toward the confused redirectees.
The old woman shouts “police horse,” and Mr. Doyle says my time is up.
When it’s Loren’s turn, she sets down her sport cup and comes to stand before us with her word. She looks down at her feet, concentrates, then works her lips as if she’s evening her lipstick. What she does next makes everyone lean back and inhale. She bends down, throws her legs high, and executes a perfect handstand — palms pressed wide on the tan carpet, spine curved hard, legs together.
No one takes a shot at what this might mean, except me. “Jesus,” I say.
Like that, she pops back up, and is shaking her hair straight before anyone can react. “Beautiful, Ronnie,” she says.