Light Lifting by Alexander Macleod

question and I’d answer and we went back and forth like that. It was great. Before that, I never taught anybody anything.
    WE HARDLY EVER GOT TO DO that kind of speciality work though. It was too expensive and it took too long to set up. When we were busy, it was pure assembly line. Churning through it. Never much of anything unique. If I wanted to slow down because something was a bit off, or I wanted to show Robbie how to get around a tricky corner, Tom would start yelling at us and say, “For Chrissake, just give it a whack and make it fit. It’s construction here, you’re not building no watch.”
    We spent most of our time in the new subdivisions. South-wood Lakes, Castlepoint, Elmwood. They all had names like that. It was a goldmine for Garlatti. The houses were all the same and every one of them needed a big two-car driveway in the front and a little circle patio for the barbecue in the back. We stormed from one lot to the next, building all these driveways onto the empty street.
    There were other companies in there too. With their own trucks and their own names painted on the side. Roofers and electricians and plumbers. Everybody was making money then. They were building the big wooden decks, or putting in the Jacuzzi bathtubs and the automatic garage door openers. The other kind of summer kids were there too. The ones who started their own landscaping companies. They were always under our feet, trying to carry around their rolls of sod and those big bags of wood chips. Southwood Lakes was the fanciest of all those places. There was a big brown wall that went all the way around it and was supposed to keep out the noise from the highway. Every one of those houses had a view of the lakes.
    We were working out there when they actually dug those lakes and it was like nothing I ever saw. A surveyor went around with a can of special spray paint and he took some readings and then drew these gigantic weird bendy shapes on the ground. Took him about a week to get it done. One time, I met him at the canteen truck and asked him how it was going and he said that they’d start digging tomorrow. The next day they came in with the heavy machinery and just followed the lines, like a cut-out in a colouring book, five feet deep all the way across.
    â€œSee that,” I said to Robbie, “I guess that’s how you make a lake.”
    But that was it. One week it was grass, the next week it was water. And everybody had a view. They put a filter system in there, like a swimming pool, so that the lake didn’t get all swampy. Southwood was supposed to be a nice place to live. Nice if you had kids.
    When they first filled those Southwood Lakes with water, JC took off all his clothes and swam around in there naked. He dove down and showed us his completely unmarked ass. And he kept calling to us to come out there and join him. He would baptize us again, he said, in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. Robbie and I just laughed at him. We were sitting in the shade of a big tree that hadn’t even been there two days before. But Tom didn’t think it was so funny. He grabbed himself through his jeans and yelled out that if JC wanted to see him naked he could walk right up here and suck his dick.
    WE NEVER REALLY KNEW OUR CUSTOMERS. Sometimes the driveways we were building were going onto houses that hadn’t even been sold yet. Everything was empty out there. Like a ghost town in the middle of a field, but full of mansions. Once in a while we’d get a renovation job back in the old part of the city and when we came back to the normal streets we could see all the differences. There was traffic and all the houses were different shapes and there were kids and dogs everywhere.
    We were doing a job like that when the old lady who hired us recognized Robbie.
    â€œIs that you Robert,” she said. You could tell she was uncertain, kind of like she couldn’t believe