Well! That was quite funny, wasn’t it?

I took four of the Empirin with water, waited fifteen minutes for them to dissolve in my stomach, and then wolfed a breakfast of dried fruit and cold Pop-Tarts.

I looked over to where the compressor and the jackhammer waited. The yellow skin of the compressor already seemed to sizzle in the morning sunshine. Leading up to it on either side of my incision were the neatly cut squares of asphalt.

I didn’t want to go over there and pick up that jackhammer. I thought of Harvey Blocker saying, You ain’t never gonna be strong, bubba. Some people and plants take hold in the sun. Some wither up and die... Why you pulling this crap on your system?

“She was in pieces,” I croaked. “I loved her and she was in pieces.”

As a cheer it was never going to replace “Go, Bears!” or “Hook em, horns!” but it got me moving. I siphoned gas from the van’s tank, gagging at the taste and the stink, holding onto my breakfast only by a grim act of will. I wondered briefly what I was going to do if the road-crew had drained the diesel from their machines before going home for the long weekend, and quickly shoved the thought out of my mind. It made no sense to worry over things I couldn’t control. More and more I felt like a man who has jumped out of the bay of a B-52 with a parasol in his hand instead of a parachute on his back.

I carried the gasoline can over to the compressor and poured it into the tank. I had to use my left hand to curl the fingers of my right around the handle of the compressor’s starter-cord. When I pulled, more blisters broke, and as the compressor started up, I saw thick pus dripping out of my fist.

Never make it.

Please darling.

I walked over to the jackhammer and started it again.

The first hour was the worst, and then the steady pounding of the jackhammer combined with the Empirin seemed to numb everything – my back, my hands, my head. I finished cutting out the last block of asphalt by eleven. It was time to see how much I remembered of what Tinker had told me about jump-starting road equipment.