The Tools He Worked Off

The hard day

There was a hard day in August. There is always one.

He came in quiet and wrong. Not high. I know high, and he was not high. He was something worse that day, which was close to it, close to giving up.

I found him sitting in the cab at lunch not eating.

“I can’t get the number down fast enough,” he said. “At fifteen an hour. You know how long it’s gonna take? All summer and then some. I been doing the math.”

“I know how long it’s gonna take,” I said. “I’m the one wrote the number.”

“Everybody looks at me like.” He stopped. “Jeff keeps calling. He’s got, he knows a guy, he says I could make the whole six grand back in a weekend if I just.”

I let that sit in the truck with us.

“If you just,” I said.

He put his face in his hands.

I did not give him a speech. Joyce likes a speech and I am no good at them. I reached over and I took the legal pad out of the door and I put it in his lap.

“Read me the top number,” I said. “The first one. First week of June.”

“Six thousand.”

“Read me today’s.”

He ran his finger down the pencil marks. “Three thousand, nine hundred and ten.”

“You carried two thousand ninety dollars of that up a ladder with your own back,” I said. “Sober. Every hour of it sober. Jeff didn’t do that. You did. You want to hand that back to Jeff for a weekend?”

He did not answer. But he ate his sandwich. And he did not call Jeff, which I know because he told me two weeks later that he had thrown the phone in the creek off the Mill Road bridge, and I believed him because he grinned when he said it, the first real grin I had seen on him since before the city.