Read Online Make Me Work by Ralph Lombreglia - Free Book Online Page B

Budweiser of this!” He puts his hands in the air and then draws them apart to form the banner he sees in his mind. “The Veritas Grit World Championship Belt-Sander Races!”
    â€œThink wild!” says Dwight. “Dream, Benny!”
    â€œHold on!” Benny says, putting his arm around my shoulders. “Wait a minute! We could put Walter here in it! Walter here could talk about being a world-class belt-sander racer, and how he would never race without Veritas Grit.”
    â€œGreat idea, Benny!”
    â€œExcept I’m not a world-class belt-sander racer,” I say.
    Benny gives me a quizzical look. “Of course you’re not,” he says. “Nobody is. It’s just a fantasy we’re having.” Then the significance of that hits him—he’s seriously considering staking his career on a fantasy—and I watch his face go through a couple of surreal changes while he wrestles with that. “We’d be manufacturing a craze, Walter. We’d be sponsoring a sporting event, the way Budweiser does. Nobody in the abrasives industry has ever done that before. They never had a sport to sponsor!”
    â€œBenjamin meant you’d be in the video as an actor,” Dwight says. “You remember—acting? Your niche in life? You’d be acting as though you were a world-class belt-sander racer.”
    â€œOh, acting,” I say.
    â€œHe gets it now,” Dwight says to Benny. Then he lowers his voice and points to his head. “A lot of actors are not really all that—you know.”
    â€œWe wouldn’t need Einstein,” Benny says. Then he slaps Dwight in the belly. “I’m liking this! Winners use Veritas Grit!”
    When the races resume, a few men have removed parts of their sanders’ housings to lighten them up, but these half-naked creatures run very wrong, sucking sawdusty wind and finally choking out altogether. Heat after heat, the rogue Makita narrows the field, Anita memorializing its conquest on videotape. I watch her pan for cutaways of an ecstatic Benny cheering from the sidelines. “Go, Veritas Grit!” he cries, urging his sander on with thrusts of his arms, and even here in the pandemonium I can see how nicely those shots will work when the tape is cut together, what a pro Anita really is.
    In the end it’s Hippie Trash versus Veritas Grit, as Dwight and Tempesto always knew it would be. The men put new belts on their sanders for the finals. I go to trackside to catch the action live. Veritas Grit’s gears must be wearing down because the first runoff looks like a tie to me. I glance back at Anita to see if she got the photo finish, but she’s standing there holding her belly, looking like a person who just ate the entire lump of wasabi from her sushi dinner, thinking it was something else.
    Rebecca has seen her, too, and beats me there. “The baby!” she says.
    Tempesto calls a time-out and sneaks off to put new gears into Veritas Grit. Dwight hustles over and hugs his wife. “Now look,” he says. “Everybody stay cool. There’s ten minutes left in this, and I don’t see why we can’t take care of business and have a baby, too.”
    â€œDwight, you swine,” Rebecca says.
    â€œRebecca, I’m closing an important business deal. We need this business to buy Pampers and strollers and everything, O.K.? Is your car air-conditioned? No? Here, trade keys with me. You and Walter take Anita to the hospital in the Bonneville, and I’ll be over in a half hour in your car. You won’t even be in labor yet, honey,” he tells Anita.
    â€œShe’s in labor right now!”
    â€œShe’s just starting, Rebecca. You realize this will probably go on for about twenty-four hours? We went to the Lamaze classes, didn’t we, babe?”
    â€œYou went to the first one,” Anita says, not bitterly, just sticking up for the facts.
    â€œWe know what to