Make Me Work by Ralph Lombreglia Page B

and the little color TV. We take the freight elevator to the top, where Tempesto’s friends are hosting the belt-sander races in their custom-cabinetry shop. The shop is the whole fifth floor of the building, pulsing with loud Chicago blues from the stereo. There must be a hundred people here, but the shop has floor-standing fans and cross-draft from every direction, and the heat’s not that bad. Sheets of plywood on sawhorses are covered with bottles of hooch and bowls of punch, dishes of hummus and baba ghanouj, salsa, chips, and wheels of cheese. The worktables have been pushed away, and people are dancing beneath springy cords for power tools which hang like bright-blue pigs’ tails from the ceiling. The racetrack runs all the way down one side of this huge warehouse space—a three-foot-wide channel like a boccie court but longer, framed by upright two-by-fours to keep the Sanders inside.
    You wouldn’t think a two-hundred-pound man in a white jumpsuit with the words CYBER SWINE stitched across the back in large red letters could disappear into a crowd, but this is what Tempesto now manages to do. Most of the men here have ponytails and beards, mesh caps advertising lumber-supply houses, big hanks of keys snapped to belt loops of their jeans. I see several guys wearing T-shirts silk-screened with the legend HIPPIE TRASH , and more women in attendance than I would have predicted. Unlike the men, they seem to have ventured outside this building since Woodstock days. They have actual haircuts, stylish ones, and color on their faces, glittery earrings and hair clips and slinky legwear, and they all look nice, but the most interesting women in the room are the two over by the stereo, holding drinks and nodding their heads at a large middle-aged man in a gray tropical suit two or three shades lighter than his blow-dried hair.
    â€œBenjamin Silk!” Dwight cries out, and then Benny looks up and sees us, and scoops us toward him with his outstretched arm. I detect that he doesn’t know who Rebecca is. And that he’d like to find out, the weasel.
    She casts me a piercing look. “We’re learning some secrets of corporate life,” she says.
    â€œâ€˜For every back there is a knife’?” I ask.
    â€œThat’s what I always say,” says Benny.
    â€œOf course it is, Benny. Where else would I have heard it? Who else has been through the wars the way you have?”
    â€œHave you been introduced?” asks Dwight. “This is Walter’s sweetheart, Rebecca.”
    â€œNo!” Benny says. “I didn’t realize that! You and Walter! Well, isn’t that wonderful. What’s a nice girl like you doing with a bum like this?”
    â€œI’ve always had a thing about bums,” Rebecca says.
    â€œYou think you can save ’em, right? Lots of women think that. Can I give you some advice? Forget it.”
    Anita puts her fingertips on her belly like someone testing a melon at the market.
    â€œDancing?” Dwight asks.
    â€œIt’s at the Whisky a Go Go in there,” Anita says. She’s had all the ultrasounds and the amniocentesis, but she and Dwight want the baby’s gender to be a surprise.
    â€œIt dances?” I say.
    â€œThe baby likes music,” Dwight says. “I think it’s the bass.”
    â€œFeel the baby, Walter,” Rebecca says, pushing me forward. “I want Walter to learn about babies,” she tells the others.
    â€œWatch yourself there, Walter!” Benny says.
    I don’t know how you feel a pregnant woman. “I’ve never done this before,” I say. I put my palms on Anita’s belly through her paisley maternity smock. The first shock is how taut it is. I didn’t think it would feel exactly like a drum. The second shock is that somebody’s in there, drumming. An up-tempo blues is playing on the speakers out here, and inside Anita the baby is jamming like a veteran of the