Rub had wished all of this in the space of roughly an hour, one wish gliding naturally into the next, unimpeded by plausibility. Since September, Sully had forgotten how full of wishes Rub’s life was. As fast as Sully’s professor explained things out of existence, Rub wished other things into being. It was not unusual for him to say, “You know what I wisht?” fifty times a day, and the worst part of it was he’d just keep repeating the question until Sully acknowledged it with a “What? What for sweet Jesus’ sake do you wish now?” The thing that always amazed Sully about Rub’s wishes was that most of them were so modest. After wishing a whole company into existence, Rub would settle for a forty-hour-a-week job at union scale, as if he feared some sort of cosmic retaliation for an arrogant imagination. Sully tried to explain from time to time that if he was going to wish an entire corporation into existence, he might as well wish he owned it and had somebody else to do the actual work. But Rub didn’t see it this way. He liked the smaller wishes and he liked to wish them one at a time. Out loud.
“I wisht we were all through with this job and sitting in The Horse eating a big ole cheeseburger” was what Rub would have liked at this instant. He was as covered with mud as Sully, and his wish for warmth and a cheeseburger probably seemed as remote to him as the possibility that somebody would die and leave him a big ole boat. “Next time you find us work, I wisht you’d let me eat lunch first,” he added.
They were now on their second load, and this time they were loading the blocks right, cushioning the bed of the truck with plywood. Half of the bottom two layers of the first load hadn’t made it. Having located Rub with so little trouble, Sully’d made up his mind to reload the truck, but fate had conspired against them. By the time they got back to the site the temperature had dropped and the sloppy ground had firmed up, and the truck, hopelessly mired an hour before, drove right out on the first try. This had looked to Sully like a sign, so he’d said screw the reloading, let’s go. His thinking was that even with the two of them working, they’d be lucky to finish before seven o’clock, which meant they’d have to do the last couple of loads in the dark. He was having all he could do to avoid disaster when he could see the ground.
They’d just left the blocks that broke when Sully hit a pothole right there in the truck. The others they’d piled with extra care out at the new site, next to the shallow hole out of which one of Carl Roebuck’s no-frills government-subsidy two-bedroom ranches would grow in about a week, weather permitting. Carl was behind on the contract, just like he was behind on every contract, and his guys would have to work right through Christmas, probably, or until the ground froze. On the way back for the next load, they’d stopped and tossed the broken blocks behind the clown billboard. “What if somebody finds them?” Rub had wanted to know.
“You didn’t write your name on them, did you?” Sully said.
They were nearly finished with the second load when they heard a car coming and Carl Roebuck’s El Camino, with its TIP TOP CONSTRUCTION COMPANY: C. I. ROEBUCK logo on the door, careened into view. It bore down on them at such an unsafe speed that it could mean only one thing — that Carl Roebuck himself was at the wheel. Carl was careful never to take his Camaro onto a job site, but he considered it executive privilege to wreck at least one company car a year by bouncing it over rutted, unpaved roads at fifty miles an hour.
“Uh-oh,” Rub said. “I bet he found them blocks already.”
Sully just looked at him. “Pay attention a minute,” he said.
Rub was paying attention, all right, but not to Sully. He was watching the approaching El Camino and looking scared.
Sully reached down from the truck bed where he was standing and cuffed Rub, who was stationed in the mud below. “I don’t want you to say a word, understand? If you so much as open your mouth I’m going to brain you with one of these blocks and bury you in the woods. And I’m going to pile all those broken blocks on top of you.”
“I wisht you wouldn’t say things like that,” Rub said. “You always sound like you mean it.”
“Mean what?” Carl Roebuck said, getting out of the El Camino.
Rub started to answer and Sully cuffed him again. Rub’s mouth closed with an audible click of his teeth.
Carl surveyed the mound of remaining blocks, which had not diminished perceptibly. “I should apply for a federal grant,” he said, shaking his head. “When you hire the handicapped, you’re supposed to qualify.”
Sully sat down on the tailgate of the pickup, took off his work gloves, lit a cigarette. “You could help. That way things’d go faster. Except then you’d break a sweat and your girlfriends’d all wrinkle their noses.”
“Let’s not even talk about women,” Carl suggested. Indeed, the mere mention of the subject made him look even more morose. “You know what the C. I. in my name stands for?”
“What?” Rub said, genuinely interested.
“Coitus Interruptus,” Carl said sadly.
“What?” Rub frowned.
“That’s Latin, Rub,” Carl reassured him. “Don’t worry about it. Learn English first.”
“If you’d use your lunch hour to eat lunch this wouldn’t happen,” Sully observed. “This used to be a nice, peaceful town. Now everybody has to go home between twelve and one to make sure your car isn’t in their driveway.”
“I wish it was just between twelve and one that they checked,” Carl said. “I can take my lunch break whenever I want.”
“Go home and see Toby,” Sully suggested, wondering if Carl knew yet about the locks. “You’re married to the best-looking woman in town, you jerk.”
Carl rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “A man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” he said. “You remember who said that?”
Sully didn’t remember.
“Where do they talk Latin?” Rub wanted to know.
Nobody said anything for a moment, but Carl was grinning now. Talking to Rub seemed to have cheered him. Sully knew the feeling. It was hard to feel sorry for yourself when Rub was around.
“I’m thinking of establishing a college scholarship,” Carl told him. “You should apply.”
“I never graduated from goddamn high school,” Rub said, halfway between recollected anger and regret.
“Then what makes you think you’re eligible for a college scholarship?” Carl asked him.
This question so confused Rub that he looked to Sully for help. “Just don’t listen to him,” Sully advised.
“I can’t believe this is as far as you’ve got,” Carl said, surveying the huge pyramid of blocks that remained.
“I can’t believe anybody set them down here in the first place,” Sully remarked. “Right next to a basement that’s already built.”
Carl Roebuck, more interested in today’s lunacy than yesterday’s, did not appear to have heard this. “At this rate you’ll still be here Christmas.”
“You’ll know right where to bring my Christmas present then,” Sully said. “Don’t go to a lot of trouble. The money you owe me will be fine.”
Carl appeared not to hear this, his attention having been captured by a detail at his feet. There in the mud were the two blocks Sully had placed in front of the truck’s rear wheels three hours earlier. They looked like they were just sitting there, like a man might be able to bend over and just pick them up, except that when Carl Roebuck tried, he discovered they were frozen in place, as immovable as the blocks cemented the day before into the basement foundation a few feet away. Carl looked at Sully, who was grinning at him.