Peter shrugged. “Dog’s thirsty.”
Charlie just looked at him. It was a good look. It said the kid had thought he’d seen all the crazy there was in the world until that very moment, but he had been very, very wrong.
All he said was, “I got to go, sir. I miss first period, Father Lehane says I’m on the bench on Friday.” Then he left.
And with the dog growling behind him, Peter went to the truck to unpack his tools and get to work.
2
The porch was sinking into the ground. The bottoms of the original pine posts were turning to mush, and there were no concrete pilings underneath, just a few bricks stacked in the dirt. Fairly typical back in the day. But now the only thing holding up the structure was habit. The porch was used to being there, so it hadn’t collapsed.
It wasn’t the kind of work Peter had imagined while he was studying econ at Northwestern. Or when he turned down Goldman Sachs for the Marines’ Officer Candidates School. It had seemed like a higher calling then, and it still did. Everything else was entirely too theoretical.
But he liked fixing old houses. He’d done it with his dad in northern Wisconsin since he was eight. The job today was simple, a battle he could win using only his mind, his muscles, and a few basic tools. Nobody was likely to die. He could get lost in the challenge and let the war years fade. And at the end of the day, he could see what he’d accomplished, in wood and concrete, right there in front of him.
He braced up the main beam with some two-by-fours he’d brought, removed the rotted posts, and set about digging holes for new footings. The holes had to be at least forty-two inches deep to get below the frost line, so they wouldn’t move every winter. In that hard Milwaukee clay, forty-two inches seemed deeper than it ought to be. But Peter’s shoulders didn’t mind the effort. He liked the fight, how the wood-handled shovel became an extension of his hands. And the white static faded back to a pale hush.
After cutting the rebar and placing it in the bottom of the hole, Peter mixed concrete in a wheelbarrow and poured it into the forms. The dog sat watching, ears up and alert, looking ridiculous with the stick tied into its mouth. When Peter walked past, it fled to the end of its leash and growled at him, that tank engine rumbling as strong as ever. When Peter returned to work, the dog sat down to watch again.
It was like a foreman who didn’t make small talk.
But uglier than any foreman Peter had ever met.
Not as ugly as some sergeants, though. Sergeants had the ugly all over that dog.
Lunch was last night’s beef stew, reheated on the little backpacking stove and eaten with crusty wheat bread and cold coffee left over from breakfast. Peter sat in his camp chair on the sidewalk, knee bobbing unconsciously to that ceaseless interior metronome, wondering how he’d feed the dog without offering up a piece of himself. No way he was going to take out that stick.
But the animal had to be hungry. Peter left some of the thick stew broth in the pan to cool. He’d pour it past those teeth in another hour.
After lunch, with the concrete hardened but not yet cured, he started cutting out the rotten sections of the deck. When he was done, there was almost nothing left. The supporting joists were sagging, half of them rotted or cracked, and all of them undersized to begin with. It would be easier to replace everything. The only wood worth saving was the main beam and the porch roof overhead. And he might as well replace the beam with something rot-proof, anyway.
It was never simple.
But wasn’t that part of the fun?
When it was time for a trip to the lumberyard, Peter put his tools back in the truck. Valuable stuff had a way of walking away when you weren’t around, in a working-class neighborhood and every other kind.
He considered the dog for a minute, and decided to leave it where it was.
Who’d want to steal a dog that ugly?
Maybe he’d get lucky and it would escape while he was gone.
But when Peter pulled up in his truck an hour later, there was the dog, as ugly as ever, and smelling just as bad. He chased the growling animal to the end of its rope to check the knots, and found that the rope had frayed a little on one side. He found the spot on the tree where faint blue strands showed on the bark, and smiled.
“Good luck, dog,” he said. “That’s climbing rope. Kevlar core.”
When he reached out to pat the dog’s head, the dog shied away. Peter shrugged and went back to work.
He supported the porch roof with long two-by-sixes braced against the ground, then cut out the rest of the deck frame with a Sawzall and hauled the pieces to the street. The dog had taken to rubbing its rope-wrapped chin on the front walk. A pretty good strategy, actually. It kept its eyes on Peter the whole time. He could feel the weight of its stare, a hundred and fifty pounds of dog planning to tear his throat out.