Townie_ A Memoir - Andre Dubus [102]
So many times during the day, Trevor D. and Doug and Jeb would pause to work out a problem: a support wall is needed here, but that makes the hallway on the other side too narrow; the stairs end here, but now the header’s too low above the last step; if the kitchen window is framed here, there’s no room for a fridge there; and on and on. I’d hear pieces of their conversation while Randy and I hauled new two-by-fours for the walls, sheets of plywood for sheathing, fifty-pound boxes of nails. Randy and I spent days pulling old ones from every stud in the house so that each one was clean and ready for twentieth-century insulation, strapping, and Sheetrock. While new construction started on the first floor, he and I continued demo work on the second and third. We knocked down partition walls. We ripped up old flooring from joists we’d then have to balance ourselves on to keep from falling through. We filled barrels with chunks of plaster and broken lathe, each one weighing well over a hundred pounds, and we’d heave them down steps and outside to the new dumpster where we’d squat on either side of the barrel, then lift it over our heads and dump it in, the plaster dust clouding back into our faces, our hair white, our eyes red-rimmed.
Randy didn’t talk much, but I knew he’d dropped out of high school, that he was married and had a two-year-old son. I knew his wife had a drinking problem and was in rehab, and that Randy’s mother took care of his son all day while he worked. I knew he liked cars and took pride in the black SS Chevelle he drove to the job site every morning. He kept it clean inside and out and parked it on the far side of the parking lot. Any tools he owned—a framing hammer, a sledge, a few pry bars, and a reciprocating saw—he’d lay on a blanket in the trunk. At coffee break, he and I would sit against the foundation apart from Trevor D., Doug, and Jeb, who usually stood in the middle of the lot looking up at the house, pointing things out to each other. Trevor and Doug were dressed for the weather, heavy jeans and work boots, a fleece vest and wool sweater over more wool over long underwear, the white cotton sleeves you could see at the wrists. But Jeb, his hair shorter now, his stubble catching the morning light, he stood there in jeans with a hole in one knee, his bare leg showing. He wore a T-shirt under a button-down cotton shirt that may have belonged to Bruce once. The shirttails hung out. But he didn’t look cold or unhappy as he stood there and tapped a Marlboro from his pack and lit up, nodding his head at whatever Trevor D. was saying, learning his trade.
At night, alone in my apartment, I’d heat a can of soup and read Marx or Engels or Weber. The radiator hissed, and I’d read the same sentence over and over, wouldn’t even see it. Later, lying on my mat in the back room, I’d thumb through catalogues for graduate schools, think about all the knowledge that would come with earning a Ph.D. in political thought, how much I would know then.
But the world didn’t seem so big now, and where were the people who wanted to change it anyway? Somehow in Texas, studying all I’d studied, I’d felt like more than just one. My reading had joined my mind to the thinkers before me, to the millions of people whose lives they indirectly wrote about, these scholars who sat in a tower so high they could see everyone and I could too. But after eight to ten hours of working with my body, I was too tired to look, a capitalist plot, I thought, to keep the prole in his place. But this assumption floated away like steam; if I was a proletarian, who was Trevor D.? He had plans to be a rich bourgeois, but I saw how hard he worked every day, how two or three times a shift, he’d sit somewhere with his calculator and paper and pencil to figure out how much all this was costing, how much was left in the budget, how much would his return be? And what did I care if he made a hundred thousand dollars on this job? As long as what he built was solid and its price was fair, what was wrong with that? Did that