Whatever good had come to me had come from my complete and utter disregard for my body’s need for comfort. But I wouldn’t allow this thought to stay in my head. My shoulders were fatigued from all the overhead work of the day, and it would be hard to keep my fists up, hard to throw punches. The only light in my room was a bulb in the ceiling, stark and too bright, and outside the windows was blackness, a cold I was planning to run through on my way to the Boys’ Club and Tony Pavone’s boxing ring.
Now the day was over, and I was in my small apartment in Lynn pulling on sweats. We’d each step up onto a stool or lidded joint compound bucket, and together we’d press the four-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long sheet up against the ceiling strapping and there’d be the electric whine of the screw gun as Jeb went to work sinking black screws through plasterboard into spruce till we could let go and drop our arms and step down to do it again and again. We’d squat and lift a full sheet, carry it under where it would go, then we’d count off, “One, two, lift,” and yank the sheet up from our sides and flat onto our heads, our finger-tips on its smooth surface to keep it from buckling and cracking. He was faster with measurements and cuts and handling the screw gun, so it fell to Randy and me to do most of the grunt work. By coffee break, all the sheetrock was unloaded and Jeb had finished the strapping. The day before, we’d started nailing spruce strapping into the joists sixteen inches on center and while Jeb finished that, Randy and I were hauling sheets of plasterboard off the truck and stacking them against a wall in each of the three rooms. It was a weeknight, probably Wednesday, and all day long Jeb and Randy and I hung sheetrock in the rooms we’d built in the widow’s house overlooking the water.
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