Dusk and Other Stories - James Salter [55]
“He didn’t charge you.”
“Me? No, I bring him a little something now and then,” Harry said. “Old Al and me are friends.”
After a while, “Claims to be a free country, I dunno …” he said.
The cowboys at Gerhart’s called him the Swede, but he never went in there. They would see him go by outside, papery skin, dangling arms, the slowness of age as he walked. He may have looked a little Swedish, pale-eyed from those mornings of invincible white, mornings of the great Southwest, black coffee in his cup, the day ahead. The ashtrays on the bar were plastic, the clock had the name of a whiskey printed on its face.
It was five-thirty. Billy walked in.
“There he is.”
He ignored them.
“What’ll it be, then?” Gerhart said.
“Beer.”
On the wall was the stuffed head of a bear with a pair of glasses on its nose and a red plaster tongue. Above it hung an American flag with a sign: NO DOGS ALLOWED. Around the middle of the day there were a few people like Wayne Garrich who had the insurance agency, they wore straw rancher’s hats rolled at the sides. Later there were construction workers in T-shirts and sunglasses, gas company men. It was always crowded after five. The ranch hands sat together at the tables with their legs stretched out. They had belt buckles with a gold-plated steerhead on them.
“Be thirty cents,” Gerhart said. “What’re you up to? Still working for old Harry?”
“Yeah, well …” Billy’s voice wandered.
“What’s he paying you?”
He was too embarrassed to tell the truth.
“Two fifty an hour,” Billy said.
“Jesus Christ,” Gerhart said. “I pay that for sweeping floors.”
Billy nodded. He had no reply.
Harry took three dollars an hour himself. There were probably people in town would take more, he said, but that was his rate. He’d pour a foundation for that, he said, take three weeks.
There was not one day of rain. The sun laid on their backs like boards.
Harry got the shovel and hoe from the trunk of his car. He was tall, he carried them in one hand. He turned the wheelbarrow right side up, the bags of cement were piled beneath on a piece of plywood. He flushed out the wheelbarrow with the hose. Then he began mixing the first load of concrete: five shovels of gravel, three of sand, one of cement. Occasionally he’d stop and pick out a twig or piece of grass. The sun beat down like flats of tin. Ten thousand days of it down in Texas and all around. He turned the dry mixture over upon itself again and again, finally he began adding water. He added more water, working it in. The color became a rich, river-gray, the smooth face broken by gravel. Billy stood watching.
“Don’t want it too runny,” the old man said. There was always the feeling he might be talking to himself. He laid down the hoe. “Okey-dokey,” he said.
His shoulders were stooped, they had the set of labor in them. He took the handles of the barrow without straightening up.
“I’ll get it,” Billy said, reaching.
“That’s all right,” Harry muttered. His teeth whistled on the “s.”
He wheeled it himself, the surface now smooth and shifting a little from side to side, and set it down with a jolt near the wooden forms he’d built—Billy had dug the trench. Checking them one last time, he tilted the wheelbarrow and the heavy liquid fell from its lip. He scraped it empty and then moved along the trench with his shovel, jabbing to fill the voids. On the second trip he let Billy push the barrow, naked to the waist, the sun roaring down on his shoulders and back, his muscles jumping as he lifted. The next day he let him shovel.
Billy lived near the Catholic church, in a room on the ground floor. It had a metal shower. He slept without sheets, in the morning he drank milk from the carton. He was going out with a girl named Alma who was a waitress at Daly’s. She had legs with hard calves. She didn’t say much, her complaisance drove him crazy, sometimes she was at Gerhart’s with someone else in a haze of voices,