Light Lifting by Alexander Macleod Page B

nice thing I ever heard him say.
    â€œYou can make good money in this business,” he said. It was like he was trying to convince himself.
    â€œThere’s lots of side jobs, lots of under-the-table stuff. Opportunities all around. You should think about it.”
    Robbie said that he would.
    We took him to this bar called the Silver Bullet. Tom picked the place. He said they had good lunch specials. The sign for the Silver Bullet had a cartoon girl wearing a little skimpy bikini top and she was riding on a big silver bullet. She had a cowboy hat that she waved in the air while she smiled her big smile. They didn’t charge us anything, or even check Robbie for ID, because it was still so early and that kind of business didn’t get going until much later on. It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the mirrors and the strobe lighting and the rest of it. It took a while before I could see.
    The only other people in there were the staff and then this other big group of guys wearing matching blue coveralls. I think they were a road crew because their clothes were all covered in black tar and they smelled like asphalt. There were probably ten of them.
    â€œCity workers,” Tom said and he snorted. “They need twenty guys to fill in a pot hole.”
    We ordered some food and JC bought everybody a round of beer and a ginger ale for me. We sat there all quiet. It was like none of us even knew how to talk. There was an afternoon ball game on so we watched that and once in a while somebody would say something after a nice catch or a double play. We ate the burgers, and they drank their beers. And then Tom bought a round, and I bought a round, and even Robbie bought a round. Then it started again. The waitress kept bringing the bottles and taking them away. After a while I started to feel a little rough because I can’t sit in a bar for too long. They had all the hard stuff right out in the open. The bottles were lined up behind the counter. I watched Robbie drinking his beers and laughing with those guys and it made me feel kind of sick, like I was doing something wrong. I was just jumpy, I suppose, but I could tell it wasn’t good.
    Then Tom got up to go to the john. When he walked past the guys from the road crew, I saw him lean over their table and say something to them. I knew right then that there was going to be trouble. There were more of them than us, they’d been here longer than us, and they’d gone through more rounds.
    One of the guys on the other side of the table got up and he started waving and shouting at Tom, telling him to fuck off and just move along. I prayed that Tom would just shut up but I knew he couldn’t. With Tom, it was instinct. He was like a Pitbull. It didn’t matter how long he’d been nice because one day he’d just have turn on you. There was a pure meanness inside of him that he couldn’t do anything about.
    I heard Tom say something about the union and about how these guys had never done a day of real work in their lives. He spit on the floor. Then two more of the men were standing up and they were trying to separate Tom from the guy who was yelling at him. They each tried to take hold of one of his arms and lead him away. Another guy looked over at us and kind of waved so that we’d come and get him. But it was too late. Tom pushed one of those guys off him and he tripped and fell into the table and the glasses spilled and bottles were breaking.
    â€œFucking pussies,” Tom shouted. “You’re all a bunch of pussies.”
    Then the guy behind Tom hit him over the head with a full bottle of beer and he went down.
    JC was across the room so fast, I didn’t even see him move. He was over there in one second. And there were two more blue overall guys there to meet him but they couldn’t stop it. It was like JC just flicked a switch in his head and he was back to being the kind of guy he looked like. He went right for