“And what do I put up?”

I pointed to the employment application in his fist. “Sign that,” I said. “That’s what you put up.”

“You’re crazy.”

I thought of Dolan and of Elizabeth and said nothing.

“You’d start on shit-work,” Blocker warned. “Shovelling hotpatch out of the back of a truck and into potholes. Not because I want your damned watch – although I’ll be more than happy to take it – but because that’s where everyone starts.”

“All right.”

“As long as you understand, bubba.”

“I do.”

“No,” Blocker said, “you don’t. But you will.”

And he was right.

I remember next to nothing about the first couple of weeks – just shovelling hot-top and tamping it down and walking along behind the truck with my head down until the truck stopped at the next pothole. Sometimes we worked on the Strip and I’d hear the sound of jackpot bells ringing in the casinos. Sometimes I think the bells were just ringing in my head. I’d look up and I’d see Harvey Blocker looking at me with that odd look of compassion, his face shimmering in the heat baking off the road. And sometimes I’d look over at Tinker, sitting under the canvas parasol which covered the cab of his dozer, and Tinker would hold up my great-granddad’s watch and swing it on the chain so it kicked off sunflashes.

The big struggle was not to faint, to hold onto consciousness no matter what. All through June I held on, and the first week of July, and then Blocker sat down next to me one lunch hour while I was eating a sandwich with one shaking hand. I shook sometimes until ten at night. It was the heat. It was either shake or faint, and when I thought of Dolan I somehow managed to keep shaking.

“You still ain’t strong, bubba,” he said.

“No,” I said. “But like the man said, you should have seen the materials I had to start with.”