Prick of the Spindle: Fiction: Allocco: The Foundation

The Foundation
By Benjamin Allocco

They stood against the dawn smoking cigarettes in silence, the wind flapping their dusty clothes. The younger spat on the ground, tossed his cigarette into the grass. He looked up to the sky. In the distance a thunderhead was rolling over the trees, billowing like smoke from some unseen fire beyond the horizon. He watched it roil and squinted at the sun in the other direction where it struggled to rise, the moon still far above it in the west.

They circled around the house to the back where a shallow pit had been dug into the earth, mud in dark globules seeming to pulsate between tiny rivulets of stagnant water from the night’s showers. A mountainous pile of dirt lay idle next to it. They looked down at the hole and sighed.

A figure appeared in the sliding glass door next to them, an immense man, shirtless, some great red scar over his misshapen, carnivalesque belly, drooping flesh hanging down his flanks like sacks of putty. The younger looked first at the man’s face, then this terrible mutilation that he could not find reason for and looked at the older. He was smiling at the figure.

The man slid the door open. “Morning,” he said. “You guys sure start early.” The jowls of his face shook as he spoke.

The man nodded, studied them a moment, said, “There’s drinks in the garage if you get thirsty. Some soda and water, whatever you like.”

The younger nodded in silent agreement and looked back at the hole, pretending to think about something.

“Yeah, it’s gonna clear up by mid-afternoon, supposedly. Should we reschedule?”

They went back to the driveway and took 2x4’s from the ladder rack of the truck, pulled tools from the big silver box behind the cab. The circular saw in a bright orange case, a chalk line, a hammer and nails, a screw gun, stakes, a laser level, a shovel.

They hopped into the muddy pit, their feet soon bulbous and huge with sticky clay. Thunder sounded from somewhere in the distance. They went about measuring the dimensions of the thing, occasionally glancing at the sliding glass door where a television flickered anonymously. The younger held the zero end of the tape, the older measured, taking it where it needed to be, cutting wood without safety glasses or gloves, leaving streaks of whitish sawdust in the grass and the mud. He put a finger to his nostril and blew out a mucus-y line of snot into the grass where it seemed to vanish in all the wet green.

The sun rose and hid behind heavy clouds and the flies and mosquitoes came out of the brush. The house was on a hill, a sloping driveway leading down to the street, the houses far apart, the lawns crisp and green except here where the dirt had oozed from the pile and matted the grass dark and ugly brown. Pausing from his position in the hole where he flung dirt with a shovel, the younger looked up and out across the backyard that dipped from their hilly fortification and ended at a line of woods, before it a bright red and green swing set that appeared brand new and artificial, a pristine and sterile contraption straight from a scientific laboratory. “Must be nice,” he said.

The older grunted and looked up from where he hammered together two pieces of wood into a ninety degree angle. “Yep. I’ll never be able afford a place like this.”

The man came back to the door half an hour later, now fully clothed, the shirt he wore stretched by the unbecoming shapes beneath, and he asked if they had taken a drink yet.

“Alright,” he said. “It’s just inside the garage door, in the fridge.” He turned and went back in.

The flies were big and biting. The younger killed two by ringing his shirt and swinging it where they landed. When he put it back on there were two greasy splotches and a hair-thin leg stuck to the bottom. He’d been bitten once on the lower back but wouldn’t feel it until he took a shower that night.

They were hammering stakes around the outside form when the younger looked up and stared at what was coming over the house. The sky was an apocalyptic black, all things in its direction engulfed by premature night.

They worked, hammering metal stakes into the spongy ground, measuring and re-measuring the height of the forms, drilling them where they needed to be, laying a level on each and across to the inside forms, and then it started to rain. Lightning arched across the dome of the heavens and they were soaked almost instantly. With mudslicked arms they pulled themselves from the hole, the older first, and he looked a creature birthed from that pit, his long hair soaked and hanging before his face, the rain dripping from his hands and his chin and his nose, washing the dirt from him like the first bath out of the womb, the sky beyond him bright only where it met the hills on the horizon so he was silhouetted there a filthy black shadow somewhere between day and night. He had a child and she was two years old and he loved her like nothing else.

The younger pulled himself up and out and stood watching the clouds above which seemed so low he might have reached them if he had a ladder. “Think it’ll blow over?” The pit was already filling with dirty water, their footprints now miniature lakes. They picked up the more precious tools and tracked that heavy clay all across the yard and into the garage where they sat and looked out at the fat droplets that hammered the truck deliberately. “Time is it?” the younger asked.

They waited for the rain to slow and went back out, their shirts drooping and orange where they stuck to their flesh, their jeans nearly black, sopping, their boots soaked in the mud. They raised the inner form to height and drilled it to the stakes, then backed up the forms with dirt that quickly melted away in all the rain. Soon they were up to their ankles in murky water. The man was watching them from the doorway.

By the time the truck came the rain had stopped and they had not had time for lunch, but they had forgotten how hungry they were. The truck crawled backwards up the driveway, beetle-like, the cylinder spinning slowly. The driver was a tall, thin man with sunken eyes and dark skin. He walked around the house to get a look at the site with the two men and he stood contemplating on the grass, a mist that was not quite rain but not quite fog dampening the country air.

“Well,” he said. “I guess I’ll get her back as far as she’ll go. Hopefully she don’t get too stuck.”

The wheels sank into the wet sod at the back of the house and would go no further. Gunning the gas and flinging mud everywhere, the driver managed to pull it out and try again, this time getting it close enough for the shoot to reach the nearest corner of the footer. The workers shared a look of relief and frustration.

While the drum whirled and mixed water into the concrete, the younger worker stood in the watery hole, leaning on a shovel, encircled by the small wooden structure they’d built, and the driver looked down at him.

“That’s the plan.” He scrunched his toes up in his soaked socks and water sponged out then back into his boots as if breathing the water.

The older came around the side of the house carrying a come-a-long and another shovel. He handed the shovel to the driver and hopped down into the pit, splashed up mud, stood watching the truck spin. The flies were back and they buzzed around each of them, and them swatting and slapping at themselves and cursing as if mad. The sun slipped through a break in the clouds and the flies slunk away with the shadows. The humidity unbearably high, the driver wiping at his forehead, he let the first of the concrete slide down the shoot and into the hole between the wooden boards they had set up. Already the concrete pushed the water through the channel. It slumped there and swelled through the passage between the 2x4’s like a massive slug stretching its length along the ground. The younger saw worms there that did not move, overtaken by the acrid sludge. A spider climbed the dirt wall and fell. Mosquitoes hung in the shadows behind the house and only one or two ventured into the light where they glowed in the suddenly oppressive sun.

They dragged the concrete through the channel with their shovels and the come-a-long, rowing it down to the other side until it reached the top of the 2x4’s, and they did this for some long strenuous minutes until the footer was full and then they leveled it off and sweated into the already sweaty air, leaning on their tools, their backs aching, their muscles useless. The man was at the door again, his hands on his strange and protuberant hips, a pleasant smile on his face.

The thunderclouds were far in the distance, way beyond the trees and the swing set, coming upon other men who were at its mercy somewhere unseen, bringing out the flies and the mosquitoes from a tremendous land that all are connected to but feel so separate from.

While the driver rinsed the truck with his hose they patted the concrete flat with the come-a-long and threw their dirty tools onto the grass. The younger took a hose from somewhere on the side of the house and sprayed the concrete from the come-along, the shovel, then the mud from his boots, then the grime and concrete specks from his hands and arms. His shirt was specked with white dots of concrete that had splashed where it landed and so was his face and hair, but he didn’t notice and he squinted up at the sun, realizing that his shirt was again dry but for the sweat. Birds were singing somewhere down by the swing set. Tomorrow they would return to the house and lay cement blocks on the hardened concrete. They would work from seven to six and they would finish the job so that it would be ready for the framers, and the framers would come and they would frame it and the roofers would come and they’d put a roof on and what was once a hole in the ground full of bugs and worms and water would be another room on an already huge house, and it would stand there for years to come, faded in the sun, withering, until one day the bugs would return and the rain would pound so that grass and weeds would grow there again, but for now it was only a slab of wet chemicals between the skeletons of trees, and those who put it there regarded it as another day’s work and swatted at the incessant biting insects.

The younger regarded the older. The sun bleached streaks in his hair, the slightly lighter ring of skin around his eyes where his sunglasses sat. He looked away and the wind blew against his clothes, flapped the fabric and spun the leaves of the trees in one long, laborious breath.

Benjamin Allocco graduated from SUNY-Oswego in 2009 with a BA in English Creative Writing and a minor in Philosophy. He currently resides in Rochester, NY and is working toward the completion of his first novel, The Keepers of Paradise. He plans to pursue an MFA in Fiction in the fall of 2010.