Chapter Eleven: Monday’s Concrete
Monday morning smelled of wet cardboard and fertilizer at Miller’s Hardware.
George arrived ten minutes early because it was his habit. He parked near the delivery dock and sat for several minutes with both hands on the steering wheel, gathering the energy to climb down from the truck. The knee had stiffened overnight. He had wrapped it carefully with an elastic bandage beneath his jeans, but the pressure only made the swelling feel confined.
At the employee entrance, a young cashier named Janelle took one look at his walk and asked what had happened.
“I slept wrong,” George said.
“On a cactus?”
“Something like that.”
She folded her arms. “Paul saw the video.”
George stopped. “Everybody saw the video.”
“I thought it was impressive,” she said, then looked embarrassed. “Not that I think people should hit each other. I just didn’t expect you to be the person doing it.”
“Neither did I.”
Janelle let him pass. She had been working at Miller’s for just over a year while taking community-college classes in accounting. She was twenty, impatient with excuses, and quick enough with the register that Paul trusted her to close the front counter alone. She knew George as the quiet man who could find discontinued hinges from memory and always offered to carry heavy purchases out for customers who needed help.
He signed in and went to the loading dock.
A contractor named Bob Haskins was backing a paint-spattered van toward the bay. Bob needed twenty eighty-pound bags of quick-setting concrete. George read the order slip, checked the quantity, and turned toward the pallet.
The sensible thing was to call the floor assistant. The sensible thing was to tell Paul he could not safely lift a single bag. The sensible thing was to admit the pain had gone from inconvenient to dangerous.
Instead, George moved to the pallet, braced his feet, and began the work he was paid to do.
The first bag went onto his left shoulder. He carried it to the van and placed it down with careful, economical movements. The second was harder. By the fifth his vision had begun to narrow. By the tenth his shirt was damp with sweat. Dust filled the folds at his wrists, and each step sent a slow crushing sensation through the joint.
He knew he should stop. He considered stopping after twelve, then after fourteen. There was always another number at which stopping would be acceptable, a number that kept moving just ahead of him.
“You all right, George?” Bob called from the van.
“Fine.”
“You’re moving funny.”
“Been doing that for years.”
Bob chuckled, then watched more carefully. George lifted the fifteenth bag. He felt the knee shift in a way that made the breath leave his throat. He placed the bag in the van and took a moment longer than necessary arranging it flat.
“Take a break,” Bob said.
“One more and I’ll break.”
He reached for the sixteenth bag. His left boot came down on a scatter of gravel near the edge of the dock. The foot slipped. His right leg moved to catch the weight, as it had done a thousand times before the injury. The damaged knee did not hold.
A sharp popping sensation tore through the joint. George went down hard. The eighty-pound bag struck across his chest and shoulder before sliding to the floor.
He could not breathe for a moment. The warehouse lights became blurred circles above him. He heard Bob calling his name, then the clatter of boots on concrete. The contractor lifted the bag away.
“Don’t move,” Bob said. “I’m getting Paul.”
George hated the command. It made him feel like a patient again, strapped to a stretcher while somebody else decided what he could survive. His mind filled with ordinary fears that had no place in a story about a heroic fighter: a worker’s-compensation form, missing hours, another rent notice, the possibility of needing surgery he could not arrange childcare for.
He rolled onto his side and forced himself upright before Paul could arrive. The effort left him shaking. He used the pallet to pull himself to his feet and leaned against it, face drained of color.
Paul came through the back doors at a pace faster than George had ever seen from him.
“George.”
“Slipped.”
“I can see that.”
“It’s nothing.”
Paul’s eyes moved from the concrete powder on George’s shirt to the white grip on the pallet and then down to the leg that no longer seemed capable of bearing weight.
“Bob, I’ve got the rest of the order,” Paul said.
Bob hesitated. “You sure?”
“Go open the front. I’ll have somebody finish loading before you leave.”
The contractor nodded and withdrew.
Paul waited until the noise from the van had receded. He was looking at George with an expression George disliked: not pity, but certainty.
