It is August hot and the roof hasn’t been put on yet. Dickie isn’t the foreman but he’s furious about the delay. He makes one of his big scenes at lunch, calls everyone lazy, punishes us with the refusal of his company and stalks off to a corner to smoke while his closest friend consoles him, touches his shoulder gently and is eventually shoved away. Nobody says much for the rest of the day.
I am new, so I don’t understand. It takes time to come around to the idea that Dickie isn’t our boss but Dickie is our leader.
***
During lunch, we listen as he explains that the owner of the company is bullshit, that the owner’s rules don’t apply to him, how things would be if he ran things, and how we should go about the day as though that were the case. He stresses that he could beat the owner in a fight, and lists names of other men he’s beaten in fights and how badly as his references.
He shows us his knuckles, he points to a scar on his bicep. He doesn’t quite flex it, but you get that he’s also showing you how big his bicep is, and when he says “this big scar” you know it only looks like a little scar because his arm is so big. A cut like that would have removed your entire arm from your body, Dave. And now we know, from the context clues, which of us is to be edged out and picked on, who should be accused of cowardice, disloyalty or stealing. Today it is Dave.
We learn to move out of the way and allow Dickie to make our decisions. It is easier this way, safer.
***
Dickie decided Dave was stealing cinder blocks from the job. I don’t know how he decided this; it didn’t seem to matter.
After lunch, Dickie shoved his tan finger into Dave’s face, drove him from the circle and exiled him to work in the sun on the other side of the building. It gave us time to get some cinder blocks, carry them to the roof, and drop them on his truck. We all shouted Scab at his truck as we destroyed it.
I knew what scab meant from my father, who is, more or less, a giant inflatable rat. He didn’t tell me that being an apprentice meant standing on the edge of a building destroying a Dodge Durango, or how destroying cinder blocks was any different than stealing them, or why I should care if someone steals from the company.
***
I made several mistakes shortly after the cinder blocks. I got too comfortable and thought being an accomplice in a collective crime would shield me from further inspection:
- I mentioned college
- I referred to my wife as my “best friend”
- I had a banana at lunch
Dickie cut me from the group quickly. I was an apprentice and that, he said, was bad enough, but all the rest of it was almost too much to bear. Not enough to be cinder blocked, but enough to be isolated, made to do the worst work, made to feel desperate and hope I wouldn’t make it worse.
***
Dickie was tan as dirt, angry as the elements. He moved slowly on purpose, working on his own schedule and was perpetually coated in construction dust. He was a golem. A mud monster who elbowed me when I got 2% milk from the lunch truck and said “It’s not the lunch truck. Lunch truck. It’s the roach coach. We call it the roach coach.” Then he yelled at the man who drove the roach coach because he was four minutes late, he pointed at the sky when he did this, as though he still told time by the position of the sun. When he moved his forearm up to point, I swear his arm cracked open and leaked dry earth.
***
The Sledgehammer Game was something Dickie invented in a terrible dream or thought of on the spot. It is the only way I have seen to regain stature and so I jumped at the opportunity.
If you are a man, and Dickie is unsure of that fact because you ate a banana one time, or you didn’t listen when he yelled at you, or if he is angry at you but cannot remember why, you are coerced into standing shoulder to shoulder with Dickie. The others form a circle and cheer or boo, depending on how they interpret Dickie’s judgment of your performance.
It feels like a carnival game, something with a secret trick that would let you win, but Dickie swears he invented it. He is the judge, and there is no other path to victory but through Dickie. There are no points. There is no finish line. Dickie stands uncomfortably close and judges the distance from your nose to the flat face of the sledgehammer head and tells people when you’ve done enough.
Your arm is outstretched and locked at the elbow. You pitch the hammer forward from your wrist, towards your face. You have to be brave and strong enough to endure the pain and not let the hammer fall into your teeth. You have to trust that Dickie won’t take the opportunity to shove the hammer into your skull. You have to sustain until he says it’s ok to stop or maybe you will be crushed under a shower of bricks, maybe he will reduce you to rubble. You win if he says you win. You lose if he says you lose.
***
I won, but I wouldn’t get complacent. I had a black eye, but most of the swelling had gone down, and I could see well enough. I couldn’t be lazy. Dickie wanted the roof on.
***
The next day, I got in a half-hour early and Dickie was already there, standing dangerously on a beam, drinking coffee from a lidless Styrofoam cup.
When the others arrived, we worked on the ground beneath him, cutting and assembling the roof trusses. Dickie didn’t move, he stood on his dangerous ledge and directed our every movement, a booming voice silhouetted in the sky. When the trusses were assembled, he stood in the center of the roof and started us in two teams on opposite sides and dared us to race.
Let’s see how fast we can do it, we thought, and if we can’t get it done by five, let’s stay late, let’s work until it’s done. Let’s hold the sledgehammer so tantalizingly close that the tremors from our muscles waft the scent of battered steel into our noses. Let’s feel the circle close in around us, lift us up and hear Dickie cry out victory. Let’s put the roof on. Let’s block out the sun.
DAN SANDERS is a writer in Pennsylvania. He is an Assistant Fiction editor at Pithead Chapel whose writing has appeared in Hobart, Split Lip Magazine, The Daily Dot, Okay Donkey and elsewhere.
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