South of Heaven by Jim Thompson

him. He didn’t know mormon boards, I guess, or maybe he just had an awful hate for jackhammers. Which is a mighty easy thing to get.
    You’ve probably seen jackhammers—or airhammers, to use their proper name. They’re used in breaking up pavement and the like. They have a two-handed grip across the top, in the shape of an elongated oval, with a heavy air-cylinder extending down from it. A steel drill fits into the end of the cylinder, and when the air is cut in that drill begins to vibrate and bounce about umpteen times a second.
    It’s not the only thing that vibrates, either, as you may have noticed. Hanging on to that jackhammer is like holding on to a steel wildcat with St. Vitus’ dance. It shakes you from your shoe soles to your eyeballs, and little chips of rock sting your hide like birdshot, and I guess God must have his ears plugged to the noise because he sure wouldn’t put up with it if he could hear it.
    On pavement jobs, the jackhammer work is only a few minutes at a time; on the pipeline, it’s almost steady. When you run out of rock, you move right ahead until you find some more. And if you don’t move real fast, if that jackhammer stops popping and rattling for more than a minute or two, you’ve got high-pressure on your tail.
    Two strawbosses ran a check on us that afternoon; one of Depew’s men also came by to check our time and note my change of jobs. Then, a little after four in the afternoon, Higby drove up.
    My partner and I had been taking fifteen-minute runs on the hammer. It was my turn to rest, and I was sitting on the ditch fill when Higby arrived. He gave me a sharp look, started to say something I guess; then figured out the situation—that I wasn’t just loafing—and came over and sat down by me.
    “How’s it going, Tommy?”
    I shook my head, shrugged.
    “How’d you like to run a hammer…steady?”
    I laughed, still not saying anything. Higby grinned sourly, then made his voice persuasive.
    “You run a nice hammer, Tommy. And it’s a lot safer than powder. You just check back over your memory and tell me if you ever saw an old powder monkey.”
    I said I’d never seen any old jackhammer men either. Then I looked at him frowning, struck by the strangeness of his urging a change of jobs on me.
    “I work with Four Trey,” I said. “That was the understanding when I hired on. I help on powder with him and I deal blackjack for him as soon as.…”
    “That’s still the understanding, as long as you cut the stuff and Four Trey wants you. I had the impression, however, that you didn’t care too much about shooting powder.”
    “I like it all right,” I said. “I like it just fine. Now, unless Four Trey’s got some complaints.…”
    “I imagine he’d tell us both if he had.” Higby shook his head. “But I’m sure he’d be willing to change helpers if I asked him to. And there’d be no trouble about finding him one. There’s always someone willing to shoot powder. Someone with so little imagination that he can’t picture himself getting killed or maimed, or who actually wants to get killed. You find a lot of those, too, around the big labor camps.”
    “Four Trey’s got plenty of imagination,” I said. “He sure as hell doesn’t want to get killed, either, and neither do I.”
    “I’d like to see you stay on jackhammer, Tommy. You could make a lot of overtime.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “And who can take it?”
    “It’s good for a man. Keeps him out of trouble. A man puts in a long day on a jackhammer, and he doesn’t want anything but bed.”
    I said I’d been keeping out of trouble long before I ever fitted hands to a jackhammer and I figured I still knew the secret. He nodded and stood up, dusting the seat of his pants. I got up, too, since it was about time to go back to work; kind of wondering about his mention of keeping out of trouble. It might mean that he’d somehow found out about Carol, but I didn’t see how he could have. Certainly, Four