He usually parked at the edge of a weedy vacant lot for sale that would soon belong to someone, adjacent to a new home under construction. It was early, and he desired to get the day started right with a brisk walk. Atop a ladder was a man in a white t-shirt, injecting nails with a nail gun as if he was stapling the house together. As he was walking by the man looked down at him and said something, what, quite, he didn’t catch, only the word “local” and a number, and it was a question judging from the tone.
He noticed they were dressed similarly, he also in a white t-shirt and jeans, though his white t-shirt was an advertisement for Singha beer, a souvenir from his one visit to Bangkok, there for a week and a half, where he had unprotected sex with a deaf Thai hooker who started menstruating mid-copulation. And so he came back with the Singha t-shirt and six-months’ wait to see if he was HIV positive, an interminable wait for the results in those early, terrifying days of HIV. Since he wasn’t conversant in sign language, the deaf hooker had communicated with him by pointing and gesturing and making nonsensical noises. When she wanted to get paid, she pointed to his wallet and grunted. She observed as he counted off the bills, and when he didn’t give her enough Baht, she grunted with more emphasis. He’d felt entitled to a discount.
“Sure,” was all he could come up with, and the man on the ladder pointed toward the front of the skeletal house and he heard the man say, “start cutting those boards. And make sure you wear the safety goggles.” Appreciative that the man on the ladder was concerned for his well-being, he came into the front yard and there was a single board lying across two sawhorses, other boards piled nearby, one by sixes if he had to guess, the safety goggles hanging from a protruding shoulder of one of the sawhorses. After affixing the goggles he found the hand-held circular saw and began cutting, one board after the other, slicing easily through them and a pile of sawdust growing steadily like an ambitious anthill beneath where he cut.
A while later and the man had descended from the ladder, and he was trying unsuccessfully to shout over the zinging metallic whine of the circular saw. From the man’s expression, he appeared upset. He took his finger off the saw trigger to hear what the man might have to say.
“What the fuck are you doing?”
“I’d think that would be fairly obvious. By the way, I’m getting paid for this, right? It’s not that I mind lending a hand, but I did have other plans.”
“I mean, what the fuck are you doing to this wood? This is all the wood we have. We’re on a schedule.”
“I’m cutting the boards in a herringbone pattern. For never having used one of these things,” looking slightly maniacal or overzealous with the safety goggles still on, he hefted the circular saw aloft and shook it for emphasis, the man staring at the Singha advertisement on his t-shirt, coming to a realization. “For never having been trained and thrown to the wolves, this is precise work if I say so myself.”
