Plan B for the Middle Class Read Online Free

eighteen railroad ties and four hundred and fifty used bricks. I tiered the garden with three levels of ties and laid a brick walkway along the perimeter. I dug the postholes and stained the redwood before I assembled the fence, and then, when I nailed the boards in place—just so along the string line on top—that’s when my plan became apparent from the window. It would be a little world, safe, enclosed, where my daughter, when she got around to walking, would tumble in the thick green grass.
    It was a dry summer and I’d wait until late in the day when the house could throw its shadow on the project and then I’d plunge out into the heat. Our pup, Burris, wouldn’t even go out with me. I was only good for two hours, and then I’d stumble into the house, dehydrated, a crust of dirt on my forehead, my shirt soaked through. Burris would lift his head from the linoleum and then go back to sleep.
    Evenings while my strength held, I marched around the yard, pulling my old stepladder loaded with four cinder blocks, leveling the topsoil. I would drag it in slow figure eights through the thick dirt with the rope cutting at my chest like a crude halter. And it was during this time, during my dray-horse days, that my neighbor DeRay would cruise in on his cycle and come to the fence and say, “Hey, good for you, Ace. I’d give you a hand, but I’ve already got a job. But you know where you can find a beer later.”
    So I started going over there when I’d feel the first dizziness from the heat. I’d drop the rope and pick my wet shirt away from my chest and walk next door and visit with DeRay.
    If I told you that DeRay was a guy who was on parole and loved his motorcycle, it would be misleading, though he did have a big blue tattoo of a skull and a rose. He wore size-thirteen engineer boots and a biker’s black cap, greasy as a living thing. In the evenings he arrived home, proud as a man on a horse, yanking the big Harley back onto its stand, and throwing his right leg back over the bike purposefully to come to the ground and stand as a body utterly capable of trouble.
    But the picture needs qualification. For instance: it wasn’t actually parole. It was like parole. Once a month DeRay saw a guy at social services to state that he had not been in any bars. He could not go into a bar for another four months, because he used to be in barroom fights. He would go to biker bars and when a fight would start, he would fight. It was his personality, they told him. He knew none of the people in the fights and the fights weren’t about him in any way, but his personality—when it was exposed to a fight, especially indoors—dictated that he fight too. So, it wasn’t parole. And he did have that tattoo on the inside of his right forearm, but unless he stopped to show it to you it was hard to tell there was a rose. It looked like a birthmark.
    He showed it to me one night on his front porch. Evenings were cool there and that is where he and Krystal sat on an old nappy couch and watched the traffic and drank beer. They drank exactly five six-packs every night, he told me, and—at first—thirty cans seemed a lot, and I worried that there might be a fight, but I came to see that DeRay generally slowed down over the evening, climbing off the porch in those big boots to move his Lawn Jet, or to pack another six beers into the Igloo. Some nights he stood and talked to the traffic. If he started talking like that while I was around, I stood and quietly left. It was his business.
    The thing about DeRay that cannot be minimized was his love for his motorcycle. It was a large Harley-Davidson with a beautiful maroon gas tank and chrome fenders. The world was ten miles deep in the reflections. The way he listened to it when he first kicked the starter; the way he kept it running—silent—when he drove away in the morning as if man and machine were being sucked into a