But Robbie was the last one we hired that summer. He started on the fifteenth of June and he worked right through to the beginning of September. His sunburn cleared up after a while. For the first couple weeks, when his skin was peeling off, he looked kind of scaly, like he was changing into some sort of lizard guy from a screwed-up experiment, but by the end of the summer he was back to normal. He never took off his shirt again though, so I don’t know what kind of scars he got left with.
“Look at him,” Tom said to me once.
It was on that second day, in the afternoon, and Robbie was running, I mean really running, with these bricks. He piled them up between his arms and carried them in stacks of seven or eight. He held the bottom one with his fingers and the top one tucked in just under his chin. Robbie moved with these quick jerky steps. There was nothing smooth about him. He was always halfway between standing up and crouching down.
Anyone who’s ever done this kind of work can tell you that the bending over is the worst part of it. Bending over and getting up, and then bending over and getting up again — it’s like you’re folding and unfolding your body all day. You get creaky. And just that little bit of weight — just the weight that’s in a couple bricks — that’s enough to grind you down. Any kid can pick up a hundred pounds if they only have to do it one or two times. But it’s the light lifting that does the real damage. Maybe it’s just thirty pounds and it starts off slow, but it stays with you all day and then it hangs around in your arms and your legs even after you leave. That kind of lifting hits you in the knees first and then in your shoulders and your neck. It used to surprise our summer student kids. It would catch them off-guard, usually in the early afternoon, just after lunch. One minute they’d be loud and laughing and tossing the brick around like it was nothing and then, all of a sudden, that little grinding pain would wind up and get a hold of them. You could almost see it tightening around them. It was like they got old all at once. They’d hunch over and get really quiet and start concentrating on the smallest things, trying to figure out what went wrong.
But Robbie ran the brick faster than we could lay it down. Sometimes he’d have to wait for us to catch up and he’d stand there watching everything we did. For him, it was like putting in a driveway was important work. After a month I think we forgot that this wasn’t his real life and that he was just passing through.
“He’s the best guy we ever had for that job,” JC told me. “It’s like he has a gift. He loves it.”
Robbie worked with us during the crazy time when the city was growing all day and all night and there was more work than anyone could do. I’m glad I don’t live in a house that went up at that time because it was all speed more than it was doing it right. If you could swing a hammer and carry a two-by-four, you were framing houses.
Garlatti overbooked us a lot. When we had too many jobs, the work we did was never very good. We were always rushing to get to the next place and we cut a lot of corners. When it slowed down and there was nothing coming up, then we took our time. We stretched everything as far as it would go.
I liked to get it right. Make it perfect. I liked the one-of-a-kinder jobs. Like when some lady wanted us to put a connecting circle pattern in her back patio. We could do that. Or when a guy wanted to write out his initials in the stone of his driveway. People asked us to do that kind of stuff for them. They wanted a big capital M in there with a different colour brick.
I know that most people don’t pay attention to paving stone when they’re walking on it, but they don’t know how hard it is to do something like that. When you’re laying down a special job, you gotta be able to see the end before you can start. I stayed up all night sometimes with a piece of graph paper, trying to figure out how to put some stupid “Q” in there and still make everything else fit.
Once when we were doing a job like that — putting in the connecting circles — Robbie asked me to show him how to do it. He wanted to know how I made the whole thing come together.
I took out my paper from the night before and I showed him how to draw out the circles with a compass and how to colour in the squares where they overlapped. I told him about how you always had to keep it balanced when you were laying it in.
“When you do something on one side, then you got to do it on the other side too,” I said. “You gotta make two circles at the same time.”
I showed him how to cut the small pieces so you didn’t waste any brick and how to bring the curve around slowly so it looked natural.
Robbie’s eyes flicked between the paper and the patio we were building. I could see that he was really studying this stuff. Figuring it out. He’d ask me a question and I’d answer and we went back and forth like that. It was great. Before that, I never taught anybody anything.
WE HARDLY EVER GOT TO DO that kind of speciality work though. It was too expensive and it took too long to set up. When we were busy, it was pure assembly line. Churning through it. Never much of anything unique. If I wanted to slow down because something was a bit off, or I wanted to show Robbie how to get around a tricky corner, Tom would start yelling at us and say, “For Chrissake, just give it a whack and make it fit. It’s construction here, you’re not building no watch.”
We spent most of our time in the new subdivisions. South-wood Lakes, Castlepoint, Elmwood. They all had names like that. It was a goldmine for Garlatti. The houses were all the same and every one of them needed a big two-car driveway in the front and a little circle patio for the barbecue in the back. We stormed from one lot to the next, building all these driveways onto the empty street.
There were other companies in there too. With their own trucks and their own names painted on the side. Roofers and electricians and plumbers. Everybody was making money then. They were building the big wooden decks, or putting in the Jacuzzi bathtubs and the automatic garage door openers. The other kind of summer kids were there too. The ones who started their own landscaping companies. They were always under our feet, trying to carry around their rolls of sod and those big bags of wood chips. Southwood Lakes was the fanciest of all those places. There was a big brown wall that went all the way around it and was supposed to keep out the noise from the highway. Every one of those houses had a view of the lakes.
We were working out there when they actually dug those lakes and it was like nothing I ever saw. A surveyor went around with a can of special spray paint and he took some readings and then drew these gigantic weird bendy shapes on the ground. Took him about a week to get it done. One time, I met him at the canteen truck and asked him how it was going and he said that they’d start digging tomorrow. The next day they came in with the heavy machinery and just followed the lines, like a cut-out in a colouring book, five feet deep all the way across.
“See that,” I said to Robbie, “I guess that’s how you make a lake.”
But that was it. One week it was grass, the next week it was water. And everybody had a view. They put a filter system in there, like a swimming pool, so that the lake didn’t get all swampy. Southwood was supposed to be a nice place to live. Nice if you had kids.
When they first filled those Southwood Lakes with water, JC took off all his clothes and swam around in there naked. He dove down and showed us his completely unmarked ass. And he kept calling to us to come out there and join him. He would baptize us again, he said, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Robbie and I just laughed at him. We were sitting in the shade of a big tree that hadn’t even been there two days before. But Tom didn’t think it was so funny. He grabbed himself through his jeans and yelled out that if JC wanted to see him naked he could walk right up here and suck his dick.