“There ain’t no use in pushing it up the hill,” Larry said. “Damn thing’ll just roll back down.” 

He wrung sweat from his black bandana, dunked it in a bucket of stale water, and tied it on his head like Johnny Lawrence, the real karate hero. He’d been telling his wife for years how they had to remake the movie into a series and make Johnny an anti-hero. “Fans will love it!” he had told her until she said write the damn show or shut up. 

He shut up. Most days he was too exhausted after ten hours on the construction site to pick up a television remote let alone open a laptop and come up with dialogue and scene descriptions and wasn’t there something with INT and EXT?

“Hell,” he said out loud, forgetting where he was like he tended to do. Job sites blended together. 

“You were saying?” Hondo called from the top of the mound, the metal legs of the wheelbarrow buried in the dirt. How they stayed Larry  didn’t know. The dirt was finely ground like coffee. Colored that way, too. 

The way the thick-chested Hondo stood blotted out the noontime sun. 

Any object no matter the size can block out the sun if you put it close enough to your eye. Words from his grandfather, spoken between cigarette drags, raspy facts to live by. Life can be deceiving. 

“I was saying we shoulda splurged for the pump truck,” he grunted up to Hondo. “Faster. Less chance of tipping the damn thing over.” 

Hondo bound down the mound in three large steps, rhythmic, the way contestants sprinted over the floating rocks in the obstacle course game shows. He pulled a wooden plank from a stack next to the scaffolding and slapped it at the angle along the mound. His walk up the plank pounded it into the dirt. 

“There,” he said, his stance no longer in front of the blinding sun, so that when he wheeled the barrow back and forth on the edge of the plank, all Larry saw were black dots.

He shielded his eyes and should’ve shielded his body. Hondo tested the velocity on the plank, pushing the empty wheelbarrow down, his boots thumping fast through the dirt. 

“Shit!” Hondo hollered. 

The tray crashed into Larry’s thigh. 

“Goll! Eee!!! Hondo!” 

“Oops,” the big man said, setting the wheelbarrow down gingerly, as if that would stop the blood from leaking out from vessels on Larry’s leg. Larry secretly didn’t mind. He was forever bumping into things he’d forget about later. His wife played a game where she guessed what object he’d run into based on the shape and size of the bruise. And then she’d trace the outline of the shape with the tip of her middle finger, using it like a Rorschach inkblot, telling him what she saw in their future. 

It didn’t mean he’d give Hondo the satisfaction of forgiveness just yet.

“Told ya,” he said. “Now imagine it full of concrete.” 

“Yah,” Hondo yahhed.

“We’ll pay just as much in spillage as we would’ve otherwise.” 

“Yah!” Hondo emphasized. 

The way the houses were built on top of each other in the complex left little wiggle room for cement trucks, especially when the builder skimped on masonry costs in order to jack up profits. A little bit times a lot added up to a bunch over time. He was in the wrong line of business. Not that you’d catch him dead in fancy clothes. 

Larry backed into the wall of shade against the house and thumbed a cigarette from a pack. He tossed the pack to Hondo and lit up with a metal Zippo lighter decorated with the red lips and tongue from the Rolling Stones logo.

“As a doornail,” he said out loud, forgetting his space in time. 

“Speaking of,” Hondo said, lipping the cigarette and bending down to his canvas tool bag. It’d been Larry’s dad’s buddy Shorty’s. “Here. Happy late birthday.” 

Larry took the gift from his friend, rolled it over in his calloused hands, stepped into the sun, and dragged deep off his cigarette. He blew a cloud of white into the blue sky, eyes wide as he thrust the hammer into the air.