What Happened, 2

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6

Abdullah’s’s pants are on fire.

This was not unusual. Abdulah’s pants were often on fire on the construction site. He was, after all, a scion of Morocco, a pretty warm country. Here we were, the orange clouds of dawn overhead, shivering in the concrete shell of a half-built temple in the marrow-chilling middle of winter in the Parisian suburbs. To keep warm, we fed scrap lumber into a rusty oil barrel propped on cinderblocks. Rough holes were punched into the metal at bottom to release heat from the red-hot embers. Until we yelled at him or La Venerable materialized, Abdulah spent much of his time rubbing his hands atop the barrel or sticking his boots close as he could to the ember holes.

“Ahhh-EEEE!!” I turned to see him shaking his right leg furiously. His cuffs were on fire. It was the left leg a couple of days ago. “You know, if you did some work over here you might actually get warm,” I said to him. I often said this to him. He grinned. The fire was out, his pants just smoking now. “Ah, my friend,” he said. “Den I would not have da time to think. Dis da problem. People do not think enough. Eeef they do, they would care more for each other. Oh, Jimmy, dis da problem.”

Abdulah, while sincere in his concern for the common schlub, was adept at transforming goldbricking into a philosophical mission statement. He also couldn’t pronounce my name, which came out ‘GEE-May.’ I preferred ‘James,’ but someone at our last workcamp down in central France had taken a call from the States from my mom, asking for ‘Jimmy.’ And that was that.

I turned back to my day’s work. Stooping. Searching for nails the Portugese had rejected after missed hammer strikes. Collecting pieces of discarded lumber spiked with nails. I hauled the booty to a table improvised from bucket and plank. Sat down on a rickety four-legged stool fashioned earlier that week from cast-off wood. I might not be a charpentier, but could still risk my well-being — sit too far to the right and the stool would collapse — by impersonating one.

Hefting what looked like Thor’s hammer, I set to straightening nails. Like a dentist pulling teeth, I extracted disfigured ones. I laid my nail patients out and one by one, then banged and re-shaped them reasonably straight. Occasionally, I bit from a sweet red apple, a donation to the Buddha. We sometimes got hand-me down food offerings brought to the temple by le fidel – the faithful – and deposited before the big golden Buddha in the first floor meditation hall. Such dana was supposed to bring good fortune to those who got it. I wasn’t feeling so lucky, just freezing. The temple’s first floor was done, and the Portugese had erected concrete pillars on the second floor upon which rested the third floor, where work had begun on the crowning pagoda. But the second-floor walls weren’t up and bitter December winds blew across the worksite.

If the Portugese had been there, we’d be on call at a moment’s notice. “Jeee-MAAAAY!” Domingo might cry from the third floor. “Mi niveau, por favor!” And off I’d trot to hunt up the mustachioed carpenter’s level. With them gone, we weren’t allowed to take on big tasks. We were just volunteer laborers, after all, who’d paid money to Service Volontaire International for the privilege of coming to France to fix the place up. This also might explain why La Venerable had been so cool lately to Abdelilah and me, since our arrival at the start of November. The temple survived on donations. While the Portugese were essential laborers, here I was un-bending nails while my fellow volunteer cooked his pants. Was that really worth 60 francs a day?

I could understand. But both Abdulah and I were keen on keeping our temple roost as long as we could. I had only to lay Thor’s hammer down and gaze north for the reason why. Le Tour Eiffel glistened orange in the morning sunlight, our North Star.

Par-EESE.

WHATHAPPENED | a fictional memoir
About ~ Chapter 1 ~ Chapter 2 ~ Chapter 3 ~ Chapter 3.5 ~
Chapter 4 ~ Chapter 5 ~ Chapter 5.5 ~ Chapter 6