The skid loader rolls down to the dump truck. As the bucket cranes upward and the unloading rubble bellows, Henry props himself on the sledgehammer’s handle as if it were an old man’s cane, and his thoughts flit to Lucius. Breathless after his one-man ambush, Lucius had made a crutch of the fire-axe. Slung his grizzled head. Begged for Henry’s help.

When the skid loader engine quits, a summer breeze whistles, whisking an almost unnerving levity over Henry. Even the fat man’s stride has a new bounce, now that he’s squeezed out of the skid loader’s pod and is walking toward his truck.

“Back in forty-five,” he tells Henry. “I’m a run this load to the dump.”

The landfill—the iron. In the dump truck’s open-box bed, the iron would be a needle in a thirty-two-ton asphalt haystack, forever a quark among acres and acres of demolition wreckage.

“Wait,” Henry shouts.

His empty belly is now an advantage. He is quick and nimble and darting for his truck bed, soon rifling between and under all the Hefty bags—where had Junior put it?—until eureka, land ho, hallelujah. He pauses, awed and frightened, observing the iron as if it were a pair of dice he was about to throw on a double-or-nothing roll.

And then the dump truck rumbles off, disappears.

Henry is a void. The iron clunks back into the truck bed. Famine has twisted him ditzy and oblivious to time, and so he opens the driver’s-side door, starts digging in the side pocket. Like he’d done with the sugar, he gnaws the corners off two ketchup packets and one relish, then squeezes them into his mouth. The silt blooms sweet over his tongue, fires a dart of sugar to his brain. He smooshes the morsels of pickle against the roof of his mouth before swallowing it all in a measured gulp. Flavor is a tease. Now that it’s trickled into him, his belly gurgles for more, for sustenance, eventually yielding to silence with the rest of him.

Only takes twenty minutes for him and Jorge to finish clearing the last of the asphalt edging the lawn and concrete of the garage floor’s foundation. They gather the remaining debris into a tidy heap so the skid loader can scoop it up in one go, and then they could load up, sweep up, get paid, and get going.