Killing myself was the furthest thing from my mind. I was only thinking about breathing. With William’s tacit blessing, I cut out bigger and bigger sections of the roof and pitched them over the side. Some I could angle so they would slide from the roof directly into the blue dumpster, which alleviated the chore of having to clean up the yard. Most importantly, I could breathe.
By the time Todd got back, just a few hours after he’d left, I had ripped off nearly the entire roof, but for the larger skeleton. I figured I could pry it apart and he could reuse the wood for the new roof. Made sense anyway. Todd stepped from the cab of his truck and considered the minimal debris in the yard. Then gazed up at me. I couldn’t tell if he was pissed or pleased.
“We can reuse these boards for the new roof.” I slapped at a two-by-six board making up the framework of the roof.
Todd pursed his lips and nodded. Then went into the garage.
The next thing I knew, he had climbed the ladder with a sledgehammer and a crowbar.
“Good idea saving the lumber,” he said. He showed me how to separate the boards nailed together using the crowbar. Once the board was down, he handed me something called a “cat’s paw” and a hammer to pull up the nail heads. “You raise the nail head. Then use this.” He handed me a “Superbar” to pry out the nails.
I cleaned up the yard first so the company could haul away the dumpster at the end of the day, saving a second day’s rental, then worked with Todd to salvage the wood. Mike came out at five to get me, but I knew Todd needed a hand disassembling the roof beams, so I told Mike I was going to stay. Todd and I got the beams down. Then he, too, took off while I stayed to de-nail them and stack the boards according to size. William also worked late, to get the foundation trenches finalized for inspection. At six o’clock he called me down to the garage. With Mike not there I felt a bit awkward, but William handed me a beer and I sat on the bucket. He again crouched, smoked, and drank.
“Doesn’t that hurt your knees?” I asked.
“The opposite,” William said, swallowing his beer and shaking his head.
“I don’t think I can bend that far.”
“I didn’t have much choice. You didn’t want to sit on anything in the bush. You’d have ants and termites crawling up your ass and in your pants. I knew a guy who sat with his ass hanging over a log and got bit by a coral snake camouflaged on the other side.”
I laughed at the visual. “Was it poisonous?” I asked.
“Hell yeah. ‘Red on yellow kills a fellow. Red on black, venom lack.’ This one was red on yellow.”
“Did the guy die?”
William sucked in nicotine, and when he raised the cigarette, I noticed a tremor in his hand. He tilted back his head and blew out a stream of smoke. “Nah. The corpsman got the antidote in him, and they helicoptered him to a military hospital. They took out a chunk of his ass about that big though.” William held his hands together to indicate a rough circle the size of a baseball. “When he came back, guys called him Rawlings.” I knew Rawlings to be a baseball brand. He chuckled. “After that everyone was looking for logs to crap over.”
I shook my head. “Wait. What? You mean so they wouldn’t get bit?”
“No. So they would get bit. You get bit and you’re flown back to base and get two weeks of R & R. That beats the shit out of humping your ass all day in the bush.” I didn’t know a lot, but I knew R & R meant rest and relaxation. “They had snakes all over that damn place,” William said. “If you weren’t looking for land mines and trip wires, you were looking for snakes. We called one ‘two-step.’ You know why?”
I shook my head.
“Because if you got bit you took two steps before you died.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. Another time, this guy got bit in the ass and the corpsman is reading the manual to determine what to do. The manual says, suck the venom out of the wound with your mouth. The guy who got bit gets anxious and says to the corpsman, ‘What does the journal say?’ Medic looks at him and says, ‘It says you’re going to die.’”
William laughed.
I laughed with him, but asked, “Did that really happen?”
“Nah, that’s an old joke that went around after Rawlings got bit.”
I took a slug of beer. “How old were you when you got drafted?”
William tilted the can to his lips. After swallowing, he said, “Eighteen. And technically I didn’t get drafted. I volunteered.”