Make Me Work (7 page)

Anita puts her fingertips on her belly like someone testing a melon at the market.

“Dancing?” Dwight asks.

“It's at the Whisky a Go Go in there,” Anita says. She's had all the ultrasounds and the amniocentesis, but she and Dwight want the baby's gender to be a surprise.

“It dances?” I say.

“The baby likes music,” Dwight says. “I think it's the bass.”

“Feel the baby, Walter,” Rebecca says, pushing me forward. “I want Walter to learn about babies,” she tells the others.

“Watch yourself there, Walter!” Benny says.

I don't know how you feel a pregnant woman. “I've never done this before,” I say. I put my palms on Anita's belly through her paisley maternity smock. The first shock is how taut it is. I didn't think it would feel exactly like a drum. The second shock is that somebody's in there, drumming. An up-tempo blues is playing on the speakers out here, and inside Anita the baby is jamming like a veteran of the Muddy Waters band.

“You could have one of your very own,” Rebecca says.

“I don't know. It seems like an awfully big decision.”

“Or none at all,” Anita says.

Diagonally across the room, beneath one of the big industrial windows overlooking Route 93, Tempesto has set up his lasers on the camera tripods. “Streetlamp shooting gallery!” he calls out now over the music. “Three shots for a buck!” he adds, and we join the crowd in front of the window to see his demonstration. It's that sublime moment in a cloudless day when the smoggy yellow horizon dissolves slowly upward through values of blue into an indigo chamber containing Venus and a few airplanes. Most cars aren't using their headlights yet, but the mercury-vapor lamps have begun to glow like giant luminous insects flying in formation over the lanes of 93. The traffic north is moving, but south to the Cape it seems to be backed up for miles. Tempesto trains one of his lasers on the highway and presses the button to shoot. He misses a few times, then hits the photoelectric cell controlling a street-lamp on the northbound side. It goes black, to the amazement and cheers of the flock around him. Dwight pays Tempesto a dollar and aims the other beam. He's done this before; on his third shot he gets a lamp.

“I'm next!” the carpenters shout, waving their dollar bills. “Let me try!” they cry, pushing one another out of the way.

After a few minutes a knocked-out lamp wakes up again, so the underlying game is to see how many you can zap before they come back on. Little by little, patches of Route 93 go dark.

“Do men ever grow up?” Rebecca asks Anita.

“No,” Anita says.

Meanwhile, Dwight has led Benny across the room to the racetrack behind us, where he stands looking down at the long enclosure on the floor and shaking his head. Dwight moves him toward the drinks. I drift over there around the dancers, and when I arrive at the plywood bar Benny is sipping a gin and tonic while Dwight drizzles hoisin sauce into a plastic cup. “This is the flakiest thing I've ever seen,” Benny says as Dwight pours tomato juice and vodka in on top of the hoisin.

“They don't have any Worcestershire,” he explains, and then he takes a sip. “Delicious. Walter, help me out. Benny thinks belt-sander races are a stupid idea.”

“No,” I say. “Really? Ever seen one?”

“I didn't even know there was any such thing.”

“Well, don't judge a book by its cover, Benny. Try to imagine yourself as early man. All around early man are sticks and stones. One day it hits him: tie a stone to a stick. What's he got?”

“A hammer!” Benny says.

“Right. And then?”

“Civilization!”

“Now you're getting it,” says Dwight. He fetches his plastic garbage bag from beneath the bar, and extracts the modified Makita.

“Well, get a load of this!” Benny says, turning it over in his hands, looking at the name of his new product emblazoned on its sides, the fresh belt of Veritas Grit installed on the machine. “We've got a nag running in this race?”

“Tell Benny our idea, Walter,” says Dwight.

“It's simple,” I say. “Winners use Veritas Grit.”

Benny's smile opens up like a streetlamp coming on in the darkness. “They can't argue with that, can they?” He sips his gin and tonic and thinks. “They just might go for this back at the ranch! They just might! But you gotta show us. We're from Missouri.”

“I'm from the Bronx,” says Dwight. “Follow me.”

At the far end of the room, the contestants have gathered with their precious horses in their hands—Makitas and Milwaukees, Black & Deckers, Skils. The races are held in heats, two sanders at a time, until two finalists remain to race the best three out of five. Yellow extension cords emerge from two knife switches at the beginning of the long, enclosed track. A racer hooks his sander to a cord, waits for the signal, and throws the switch. Anita starts taping the first racers getting ready to run.

“Can you do that?” Rebecca says. “Are you O.K.?”

“It's just a tiny little camera,” Anita says. “I'm fine. I love shooting.”

Her camera goes through a cable to the small monitor propped on a chair. I watch the proceedings on the screen, through Anita's eye. The racers get into position; the official gives the signal; they throw the switches. The whole thing takes about three seconds—the sanders hurtling down the track so fast I'm surprised Anita can pan to get it. Somehow it's not quite the mythic deed I imagined. But Benny's enjoying it thoroughly. “Way to go, boy!” he calls out to the winner.

Most of the thirty or so contenders have shown up with the sanders they use every day, rugged machines that put bread on the table but don't know the taste of glory. After a half hour of heats, all but ten have been eliminated. Tempesto, known to be fast, has skipped the preliminaries. Now he's up. The guys with the
HIPPIE TRASH
T-shirts have the hot sander, an expensive-looking Milwaukee, but Tempesto doesn't go against them at first. He has to grind his way up through the ranks. He approaches the track holding Dwight's garbage bag, and with a grand flourish he unveils Veritas Grit.

“What the hell is that!” the other racers cry, laughing at the ugly homebrew thing. “What's Verified Grit?”

“Veritas,” Tempesto corrects them. “It's Latin for Harvard.”

He plugs the machine in and places it on the track next to a spanking Black & Decker, lots of heavy chrome. The official counts down to the start. When the Makita gets the juice it makes a cracking sound they haven't heard around here since Yastrzemski retired, bucks into the air, hits the floor and zigzags out of control, pinballs against the wooden boundaries, knocks its opponent over, and finally flips right out of the track and across the floor before Tempesto shuts it down.

“What the hell was that!” the carpenters shout.

Dwight and Benny huddle around Tempesto for a conference. Tempesto seems to know what's wrong. He sticks a screwdriver into the machine to adjust some things, installs a new sandpaper belt, and they run again. Whatever he's done is what it needed, because now Veritas Grit just makes the Black & Decker look silly, smoking past the finish line before the poor Decker is halfway there.

The carpenters are mad. They demand to see the Makita. They want to hold it. “It don't weigh nothin'!” one of them exclaims. “Disqualify this thing!”

“No, boys,” says Dwight. “No, no. Nobody said this was a stock-sander race. You don't change the rules in the middle of a game.”

The carpenters run their knowing thumbs along the belt of Veritas Grit. “Where did you get this?” one of them asks. “I've never seen this anywhere.”

“That's our sponsor's new product,” says Tempesto, winking at Benny, who is happily florid on the sidelines, gin and tonic coming through the armpits of his suit. “Soon at a store near you.”

The carpenters call a time-out to tweak their machines. Rebecca puts Anita in a chair by the window and rubs her with ice while Dwight rewinds the tape to look at it.

“I'm liking this!” Benny says, watching the little screen. “I think I can sell the kid on this! This is the kind of thing he just might like!”

“That's the spirit, Benny!” Dwight says.

“I just had a thought!” Benny says. “A big thought! This could become some kind of craze! We could become the Budweiser of this!” He puts his hands in the air and then draws them apart to form the banner he sees in his mind. “The Veritas Grit World Championship Belt-Sander Races!”

“Think wild!” says Dwight. “Dream, Benny!”

“Hold on!” Benny says, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Wait a minute! We could put Walter here in it! Walter here could talk about being a world-class belt-sander racer, and how he would never race without Veritas Grit.”

“Great idea, Benny!”

“Except I'm not a world-class belt-sander racer,” I say.

Benny gives me a quizzical look. “Of course you're not,” he says. “Nobody is. It's just a fantasy we're having.” Then the significance of that hits him—he's seriously considering staking his career on a fantasy—and I watch his face go through a couple of surreal changes while he wrestles with that. “We'd be manufacturing a craze, Walter. We'd be sponsoring a sporting event, the way Budweiser does. Nobody in the abrasives industry has ever done that before. They never had a sport to sponsor!”

“Benjamin meant you'd be in the video as an actor,” Dwight says. “You remember—acting? Your niche in life? You'd be acting as though you were a world-class belt-sander racer.”

“Oh, acting,” I say.

“He gets it now,” Dwight says to Benny. Then he lowers his voice and points to his head. “A lot of actors are not really all that—you know.”

“We wouldn't need Einstein,” Benny says. Then he slaps Dwight in the belly. “I'm liking this! Winners use Veritas Grit!”

When the races resume, a few men have removed parts of their sanders' housings to lighten them up, but these half-naked creatures run very wrong, sucking sawdusty wind and finally choking out altogether. Heat after heat, the rogue Makita narrows the field, Anita memorializing its conquest on videotape. I watch her pan for cutaways of an ecstatic Benny cheering from the sidelines. “Go, Veritas Grit!” he cries, urging his sander on with thrusts of his arms, and even here in the pandemonium I can see how nicely those shots will work when the tape is cut together, what a pro Anita really is.

In the end it's Hippie Trash versus Veritas Grit, as Dwight and Tempesto always knew it would be. The men put new belts on their sanders for the finals. I go to trackside to catch the action live. Veritas Grit's gears must be wearing down because the first runoff looks like a tie to me. I glance back at Anita to see if she got the photo finish, but she's standing there holding her belly, looking like a person who just ate the entire lump of wasabi from her sushi dinner, thinking it was something else.

Rebecca has seen her, too, and beats me there. “The baby!” she says.

Tempesto calls a time-out and sneaks off to put new gears into Veritas Grit. Dwight hustles over and hugs his wife. “Now look,” he says. “Everybody stay cool. There's ten minutes left in this, and I don't see why we can't take care of business and have a baby, too.”

“Dwight, you swine,” Rebecca says.

“Rebecca, I'm closing an important business deal. We need this business to buy Pampers and strollers and everything, O.K.? Is your car air-conditioned? No? Here, trade keys with me. You and Walter take Anita to the hospital in the Bonneville, and I'll be over in a half hour in your car. You won't even be in labor yet, honey,” he tells Anita.

“She's in labor right now!”

“She's just starting, Rebecca. You realize this will probably go on for about twenty-four hours? We went to the Lamaze classes, didn't we, babe?”

“You went to the first one,” Anita says, not bitterly, just sticking up for the facts.

“We know what to expect,” Dwight tells Rebecca. “You're overreacting.”

“I'm overreacting?”

“You're being considerate. But you're a little worked up.”

“I'm worked up?”

“Anita's going to the hospital to have a baby. People do it every day. You'll be fine, sweetheart,” he says to Anita, though she seems to be going into a trance.

“Walter, you know where Brigham and Women's is, right?”

“It's where all the hospitals are, isn't it? I think so. Do I?” I ask Rebecca.

“Oh, God,” she says.

The whole concept of a freight elevator takes on new meaning as we transport Anita to ground level in the dark, creaking box. Rushing from the building to open the car for the women, I wonder if Hippie Trash did something psychedelic to the punch upstairs. I'm picking up the world like a satellite dish. I'm hearing everything. I hear the blades of crabgrass rubbing each other in the crummy sand-soil of the concrete planters along the parking lot. I hear the mechanical noises of the belt-sander race. If I had to be up there right now, the sandpaper would shred my brain. As it is, I can distinguish the scrape of every different shoe on the asphalt out here.

“Does anybody else happen to feel like they're on drugs?” I say.

“I do,” Anita says.

“Drugs?” says Rebecca. “You're supposed to be driving the car.”

“I can drive fine,” I say, the way people always say these things.

We get Anita in the back seat of the Bonneville, Rebecca in there with her. Once I get behind the wheel, I understand what's happening to me: I have a friend who has become for the moment a creature, a mammalian creature engaged in the live birth mammals are famous for, and I'm sympathizing with that, resonating with it. I'm an animal now myself.

“Music might help,” Anita says. “Could you turn on the radio?”