overhead.
Markie pops a top, wants to know, What are you talking about?
Tomorrow, the next day, says Tom, they'll be putting the roof on. That spot you're sitting on, Markie, man, no one'll ever see the moon from right there again.
Unless the house burns down, laughs Markie. Like if Jimmy's asleep on the truck or something. Then you can see the moon from here.
House burns down, that spot's gone, too, says Tom. Nope, no more moons from here. He lifts his beer can to the moon, to say goodbye.
Jack snorts. This's gonna be the bedroom. Some just-married guy moves in here, you can bet he'll be seeing plenty of moons.
No one answers.
It was Jack's idea to come out here tonight. Everyone else agreed, shrugging, saying, Sure. It's not so often they hang together anymore, the four of them. Tom and Vicky have a kid now, Michael, and Vicky's pregnant again, due in March. Markie's got the job and his family. Jimmy's working a fireman's tours, and anyway there's this strange thing between him and Jack. And a strange thing, too, between Jack and Tom, different from when they were kids, when Tom knew what to say to his brother, when he knew what would work to calm Jack down.
So when Jack says, Let's get some beer, go out to Coleman Road, they all say, Yeah, sounds good. Since they were kids, this was a thing they did, hang out on the construction sites in the neighborhood. It makes them theirs. Jimmy sees it this way: you can't stop people from changing your world. There are too many people, and you never know what they're planning until it's too late. But what you can do, you can make the changes part of you. You can take changes inside you as though you're big and they're small. Instead of letting the changes be something that makes you choke, you can breathe them in.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.
He doesn't say this to the others, and he's not sure they have the same reasons why they want to come out to the half-built houses and drink beer (instead of chasing each other around and throwing dirt bombs, that's what hanging out meant when they were kids). Sometimes—always, back then, but now just sometimes—the girls come with them; but mostly, like tonight, as though they'd talked to each other about it (they never have), they don't tell the girls where they're headed. Just, Me and the guys, we're going to have a couple beers.
Even Marian. Jimmy thinks she'd get it; at least, she'd get why he does it. But Marian doesn't hang out with Jack or Tom anymore. She never tells Jimmy not to, she never tells him what to do about anything unless he asks her what she thinks, and the funny thing is, he knows she still likes Tom, everyone does. And Jack, he always made Marian laugh, and Jimmy knows she misses Jack, misses laughing like that. But she doesn't hang out with them anymore.
Tonight it was Jack's idea, but he's been in a lousy mood the whole night. Markie seems a little weird, too, Jimmy can't put his finger on it. Jumpy maybe, and pretending like he's not.
That thing Markie was going to tell Jack about, the thing Mike the Bear asked Jimmy to help him out with that afternoon in Flanagan's, Markie says he told him.
What did he say? Jimmy asked Markie this last weekend, the two of them hammering asphalt shingles back onto the roof of the O'Neills' porch. Old man O'Neill, he can't do this stuff for himself anymore, and Jimmy and Markie don't have much else to do on a Saturday afternoon.
Bullshit, says Markie.
He said Bullshit?
Yeah.
What does he mean, bullshit? He doesn't think it's true?
Uh-uh. Markie leans way over for the bucket of nails that's by Jimmy. He slips, grabs, but gets nothing. He's about to slide, he's headed right for the edge of the roof, but Jimmy's got his foot braced against the tree that leans on the porch, and he grabs Markie, pulls him, and then Markie sticks his foot out against the tree, too.
Jesus Christ, man. Jimmy breathes, waits for his heart to stop kicking his chest. Jesus Christ. You come over here, let me do that part, says Jimmy. Markie grins as he and Jimmy crawl over each other on the roof, so Markie's near the tree.
Jimmy grabs a handful of nails on the way, drops them in his shirt pocket so he doesn't have to lean over for the bucket. He sticks four in his mouth for the first shingle on that side, takes them out one by one, and hammers them in. He waits till he's done before he says, You're telling me Jack doesn't buy it? He doesn't believe it, that the cops are closing in?
I didn't know what the hell else to say, says Markie. I told him. I said man, they're coming to roll you up, Jack, man, you gotta cool it, you gotta be Mr. Clean. He wanted to know where I got it. I said I heard it around. He said, Bullshit. He said, Stuff like that, if it's true, you don't hear it around.
Hmmm. Jimmy's got nails in his mouth again, so he just grunts, pushes hard on a shingle that's supposed to slip under the next one but it doesn't want to go where it belongs. When he finally gets it in and hammered down, he says, Could be he's right about that.
Well, what the hell, where did
Yeah, well, says Jimmy. He isn't sure he wants to say to Markie, Mike the Bear told me, me and him had a drink at Flanagan's and he asked me for help. That seems wrong, Jimmy telling Big Mike's secret: that he'd come up against something he couldn't take care of on his own. Jimmy's thinking what to say when Sally calls from down in the yard, do they want a Coke or something?
We're almost done, shouts Jimmy.
Markie says, Yeah, Jimmy, man, can you give me a hand with this one? Jimmy pulls himself over to where Markie is, and they wrestle the last couple of shingles together.
Now they're sitting, all four of them, on rough plywood sheets in a spill of moonlight under the outline of a roof that'll be getting its own shingles soon. Jack's drinking more than everyone else, and he's talking louder when he
