JC was a little bit off. Something bad happened to him, I think. Maybe it was in those war simulations or something in the training that’s supposed to break a guy down into just his basic parts. Once, Tom asked JC if he was sure that his parachute opened every time he jumped out of the plane. Tom acted it out for JC. He whistled a windy high note when he thought about JC falling through the air and then he slapped his hands together hard when he thought about him hitting the ground.
“Come on,” Tom said. “Think back. That happened to you at least one time. Whatever it was, you had to get whacked pretty hard to turn out like this.”
JC squinted a lot, like he was always staring into a lamp that was too bright. But I don’t have a bad word to say about him. The guy was completely sound around me except for all his talking about God and the holy scriptures and the coming of the Rapture or whatever. He could really work too, almost like he was powered by the Almighty Lord or some other crazy magic. He could just go and go and go, no matter what time it was, or how hot it was, or if it was raining, or if it was snowing. During his lunch hour he prayed and he read the Bible to us out loud.
The guy was carved up so tight it was like the muscles in his back and his stomach were drawn in with the tattoos. When he took off his shirt, he looked like the worst sort of criminaclass="underline" the kind in the prison movies who do hundreds of push-ups and sit-ups in their cells. It bothered some of our customers to have him around. The young married couples with kids and minivans didn’t want a guy like that working in front of their new houses. JC had a special feel for those kind of people. He could sense them. When somebody looked at him like that, he never let it pass. He always wanted to talk to them, explain his whole life story. Tell them how he’d been transformed.
“You do not need to be afraid of me,” he’d say.
One time he started talking like that to a guy who was watering his lawn while we put in his driveway. The man had been staring at us for a couple of minutes and I remember that he was wearing a green golf shirt and he didn’t have any shoes on.
Right out of the blue JC said to him, “You can change yourself, you know. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
He talked with that funny up and down rhythm that the black preachers have.
“We can change ourselves,” he said. “Just look at me. You have to look if you want to see.”
And then he turned around so the man could read the words and see the pictures on his back.
“I am the proof,” JC said. “I am the proof that you can change. This is the skin of a different man. This is just a shell to remind me of how it used to be. But I am saved now. And you. You can be saved too.”
The guy with the golf shirt just stood there and nodded his head. I don’t think there was anything else for him to do. The hose kept dripping water on the grass and JC kept turning himself around. From where I was standing, I couldn’t tell if the barefoot guy was having a religious experience or not.
Tom tried to smooth things out after that. Whenever he talked to customers Tom was always professional. He told the barefoot guy that we apologized for the inconvenience and that it would never happen again and that we could discuss a discount or something. But later, when I saw him whispering with JC, Tom was back to himself. There was spit foaming at the corners of his mouth.
“You ever do that again,” he said to JC, “and you’re gone.”
Tom was trying to keep himself together, trying to keep it low, but I could hear him breathing hard out of his nose and I could see the way he was trembling all over when he talked. For a second, I thought he might actually haul off and punch JC right there in this guy’s backyard. I was thinking that that would have been good for our reputation.
“We’ll dump you so fast it’ll make your head spin,” Tom told JC. “And then what’ll you do? Where would you go then? Nobody else would take you.”
Our company worked guys who couldn’t get any other kind of work. Garlatti, our boss, he looked for people like JC and like Tom. Guys who were desperate for a job or stuck because of something they did a long time ago. I worked with Tom for years but I never found out what happened with him. I heard he beat somebody up. Somebody close to him. His wife or his girlfriend or one of his kids, I think, from before. He lived by himself now but I think he still had to pay out almost all the money he made. Tom had to take lots of days off because he was always going to court or to these meetings with some officer who was supposed to keep track of him.
I ate my lunch with Tom every day and every day it was the same thing. At exactly 11:30 he’d go to the back of the truck and haul out his little red cooler. He’d open it up, bring out the cold six-pack, and then he’d drink every one of them in less than half an hour. In all that time, I never saw the guy eat food during lunch. And every day — every single day that we worked together — he made a point of offering that last beer to me, just because he knew I had to stay away from that stuff.
“Come on, Jimmy,” he’d say and he’d wave the last can in front of me. Back and forth and then back and forth another time. “What the hell difference does it make now. You’re past all that.”
In the beginning Garlatti paid us absolutely nothing. But every once in a while he softened up a bit. He used to give us these secret raises that we weren’t supposed to tell anybody about. One week your check would be fifty or seventy-five dollars bigger and when he handed it to you he’d give the paper a little extra push into your hand so that you’d know not to open it in front of everybody else. That’s how he kept his regulars for so long. We kept coming back every week, waiting for that extra fifty bucks to show up.
IT WAS DIFFERENT for the kids though. Garlatti paid them the straight minimum wage and he never budged on that. The man never paid out one cent more than he had to. In the beginning, some of the students tried to pretend that hauling bricks was simply good exercise. Like they figured that if they had to work a bad summer job then they might as well get a tan or get in shape when they were doing it. Guys like that never lasted. Before we got Robbie, Tom must have hired and fired 50 kids, almost one a day since the beginning of the summer.
The job was simple. Carrying bricks, that was it. Carrying bricks all day long and shovelling a little gravel here and there. The kids had to run new brick off the pallets and wheelbarrow away the scraps and the cut pieces. It was their job to keep us stocked up all the time so that me and JC could lay it in nonstop. At first, most of them thought the job couldn’t be that hard. But when we needed to, me and JC could lay it down pretty quick. Back and forth, as fast as fast. Somedays, if we got a feeling for it, we could knock off three driveways or maybe five backyard patios.
The kids usually came out in the morning, worked with us for a day, and then quit when we brought them back in the afternoon. It was the best thing for all of us. They didn’t even come back at the end of the week to pick up their money. Garlatti was smart. He probably pulled a couple hundred hours of free work from that one little piece of paper he had stuck to a bulletin board down at the employment centre. It was like we had a never ending supply of kids to break down.