Our city was yellow with Big Construction. Yellow backhoes, yellow tractors, yellow bulldozers, yellow cranes, yellow dump trucks, yellow excavators, every construction site ruled by name brand equipment. It wasn’t the color that was the problem. It was the uniformity and sameness. The monopoly of mechanical might.
That’s why me and the boys decided to do something about it. Funny “Zack” Creatine and Gobbling Gregory and me, we had a good idea that got better every day.
First the idea was terrorize the construction sites, make ‘em fear the shadows and the night. Funny “Zack” has a knack for vandalism. Ever since school days he was a ransacker, an agent of chaos. Always been a bit unlevel, that one. Bad home life gave him a madness. He grew up and had kids and straightened out a little, but that urge for destruction always lived inside him.
Gobblin’ Gregory made the right on observation that terrorizing the sites wouldn’t change anything, so the idea turned into breaking their machines at night, make them look unreliable. Gregory likes to stir things up, too. When we were kids he would sneak into schools at night and break lockers, chemistry labs, basketball goals, anything. I told the guys this wouldn’t work, either. The construction bosses would buy the same equipment again, and Big Construction would get more money in its pocket.
So the idea turned into beat them at their own game. Make our own construction equipment, make it better than the big names, and bring freedom of choice back to our city.
Neither Creatine or Gregory or me were engineers or mechanics or builders or mechanical guys of any ability. We were good at breaking things, not at building them. Gregory and Creatine built a hang glider one summer and their friend Tandum flew it off a building and died, because it fell to pieces in the air. You make a mistake like that, you got to stand up, dust yourself off, and try again. You just wait until after the funeral.
We didn’t have technical knowledge, but something we did have was garages. Each of us had one. We also had a knack for figuring things out if those things could work to our advantage. We bought a lot of parts and tools off the internet and we read a lot of websites and chunks of a lot of books and over a few weeks we started figuring out how to work with engines, metal, power, how to put things together, and soon enough, after a lot of false starts and broken equipment, we had built the pieces of a big puzzle, which we brought together in my garage. When the puzzle was put together it was a bulldozer, not a treaded one but a wheeled one, versatile, roadworthy. We painted it green and white. Eight days after we completed it we got its engine running. It growled. What a monster.
We’d spent nine thousand dollars to get this thing built, and close to six months of every afternoon and night and weekend. While we took turns driving the growling, shaky monster around my back yard, we talked about the road ahead. We could see this mission was going to be harder than we thought. Building an army of construction equipment to compete against the Big Guys was going to take its own small army. We had no army, just us. We had no investors, just us. We had no factories, just three garages, and half of Greg’s garage was taken up by his station wagon because his wife refused to let him park it in the driveway, because it was vintage and she said they didn’t make that color paint anymore. So we had two and a half garages.
To make money to buy more parts to build the rest of our machines, we rented our bulldozer out to neighbors and friends and coworkers who were involved in projects that required just that kind of tool. My manager Franz at work was trying to build a pool in his backyard and I told him a bulldozer is useful for moving big gobs of land out of the way. Creatine’s sister knew a guy who needed to move some sand. A bulldozer moves sand. Gregory’s neighbor got tired of his son’s car always ending up in the yard so we rented our bulldozer to him so he could scoop that hunk of junk into the street.
Another couple weeks of stuff like this and we had two things: a bunch of money to spend on our next bulldozer, and a growing reputation in the community for affordable machinery that gets the job done.
Our next bulldozer took just a month to build. We had a better idea of how to do it, we had learned from a hundred mistakes. This green beast roared just like the first one, moved stuff just like the first one, and made us a good deal of money from rentals.
The third bulldozer was our last. It was our best. But you can't compete with the Caterpillars and John Deeres of the world with only bulldozers. It was time to diversify. Maybe a backhoe or a crane or a dump truck to fill out the line up. The problem was these were different, these were new machines, and new machines meant learning new things, starting over. Gregory made a good point, that we were running out of space to store these suckers. We each had a garage, or half a garage, and not much more room than that. Where would our new machines go? Backhoes are huge. Cranes are huger. Dump trucks aren't small, either.
After some heated late night yelling matches while riding our bulldozers around my yard, we came up with a new plan of action. We’d rent out not only our bulldozers but ourselves as operators. We could charge more and we could get the jobs done faster, then when we had time, build more bulldozers, then recruit more operators, and have a business going. That business would crush Big Construction. We had a reputation now, and Creatine’s uncle, who lived a ways down the street by the dried up well, had started calling us the Dozer Dudes, a name that was catching on.
Creatine spray-painted “Dozer Dudes” on a three by four foot aluminum sheet and leaned it against the outside of his garage door. Our company was official.
Since we wanted to get our jobs done faster, we decided to beef up the bulldozer engines. This ended up being more expensive and difficult than we thought. We had built our engines from car parts and truck parts and from engine parts we could buy on the internet. We had learned all we could, and the unending nights of tinkering and hammering had rattled our brains to a murky pudding. Making these engines faster without making them a lot bigger, that was beyond our skills. Lucky for us, one of the ladies we rented our bulldozer to some weeks back knew a recently retired mechanical engineer named Totino, and I got his number, called him up, and invited him to come look at our bulldozers. Turns out when you get a professional involved and you ask for their time and opinions, you have to pay them. So we did.
Totino liked what we were about, he liked the way Gregory put the mayo thick on his sandwiches and ate with his mouth open, he liked how Creatine talked with a dialect we could never place, he liked my tall bookcases and the books that were on them, he thought we were a bunch of swell guys with good ideas and straight heads, and he wanted in on the business. We thought about that, about whether splitting our profits four ways instead of three would be better than paying for his time every week. Might be that the profits we split four ways would be so much greater than our current profits split three ways that it would be an easy choice. If we wanted our engines working better, faster, stronger, then getting a mechanical engineer in the mix might help. That would make our profits grow. We let him in.
Fast forward five hard months of explosions and property damage and late nights and screaming neighbors, and we had faster bulldozers. These bastards reached 60 mph on the street. You should have heard those terrifying howlers, man, they were loud and nasty. We lined up piles of trash and random junk from around the neighborhood and performed speed trials on them, turning the street into something like a monster truck rally, but for bulldozers. The tricks we learned to pull, man...
We rented our services out to the community, with myself, Gregory, and Creatine operating the bulldozers, doing jobs quick and right and making good money. Anything that had to get crunched or crushed or pushed or shoveled or hauled, we were there, doing it. Easy stuff, most of the time. Totino helped us fix up the monsters when they broke down or took damage. He figured out ways to maximize our profits by deciding which jobs to take. He wasn’t much of a pilot, so he handled the brain stuff. Earned his keep fast.
Funny "Zack" Creatine's day job as a furniture salesman wasn't raking in the kind of dough we were getting for our services, so he quit to focus full time on Dozer Dudes. He picked up most of the daytime work. Gobbling Greg wanted to quit his job, but his wife Dorothine wouldn't let him, said he would die young if he retired early. He called out sick as often as he could and spent those days bulldozing.
We didn’t know it when we got into the game, but bulldozing for long stretches, especially in a bulldozer you helped build and care for, can create a tranquility of the mind, plopping you right into a state of zen. The rumbling roar of the powerbeast carrying you onward to demolition and the clearing of paths, the moving of matter, has a quality about it that nothing else does. It sounds like it might give you a headache or body aches, but it doesn’t. It throws you into a new form of life that is imbued with terrible might and mechanical precision, and you are ensnared in that life like a symbiote. I would go to bed rumbling, my body quaking for more of that power and pleasure. In those days the most balanced and vital I felt was when I was commanding my bulldozer over uneven ground, scooping a massive body of earth or debris or junk off into the sunset.
This sensation was shared by my buds. Greg’s wife Dorothine threatened to withhold sex after she found out he was skipping work to ‘doze. The guy’s default mode is sex crazed and ready to go at the first hint of eye contact, but after he got a taste of ‘dozing, his wife’s withholding had no effect on him. A lot of times he’d run out to his garage in the middle of the night and take his bulldozer for a spin around the block, waking up everyone in the vicinity. Creatine started using his bulldozer to go to the grocery store and to take his kids to school and to go to the DMV. We had developed attachments to our machines on a higher plane.
Advertising is a good thing if you need it, and if you like the kind of mind pollution it puts into society, but the price can tear you down. We didn’t spend a penny on ads because word of mouth got us everything we wanted. The jobs we were doing, they were good dough, but that wasn’t the point. We were declaring war. One of the important things about declaring war is making sure the party upon whom war has been declared is aware that war is being declared on them. That hadn’t happened yet. Far as we could tell, Big Construction was oblivious to our existence. We probably weren’t hitting them, taking any of their business. That was about to change.
Totino’s last job before retirement had been at an automobile company that was looking to expand its manufacturing facilities. The facility in our area was about to begin the remodeling and improvements. Totino was still friendly with some higher ups in the company, executives mostly, and made them some clever offers for bulldozing services, saying he had the three best bulldozers and bulldozer pilots in the city ready to take on a big job. He got our past customers to call in and sign off on praise for us. The people in charge of making those kinds of decisions finally came around to seeing things the way Totino wanted them to, and accepted our offer. Our biggest job had just landed in our laps, and with the three of us riding our beasts into battle, it was done in under a week. The original contractor had estimated three weeks for that phase.
We landed another job like that one, swooped in and stole it from the first contractor, at Creatine’s kids’ school. Bulldozed the whole playground to make way for a new one, a better one. Took us a day, original contractor had estimated a week. We got paid a week’s pay for a day’s work, and the original company lost it.
The shopping center a mile from my house, where I buy my lamps and tables and curtains, wanted a bigger parking lot, and the contractor slated to do the job couldn’t start for a couple months, so the Dozer Dudes came in and did the ‘dozing for half the price, in four days. Another contractor one upped.
Then another big job, and another, and more and more we were taking work from Big Construction, giving it to the little guy, showing the city that Dozer Dudes could do what the other dudes do, but faster and better and cheaper. And it told the city that if we had more than bulldozers, we could reinvent all of construction, we could change the world.
Dozer Dudes made the front page of the local papers, and I got to do interviews with a couple of them. They gave me a platform, and I used this platform to make our grand declaration of war as clear as I could. In retrospect I can see some of my words hit hard and my attitude was off-putting, like I was intoxicated by the Zen of ‘Dozing. I don’t regret what I said, but I’d be more careful if I had to do it over. Truth be told, being interviewed was a great experience.
Interviewer: Do the Dozer Dudes have a background in construction or machinery?
Me: None of us. Our guy Totino's a mechanical engineer, the only smart one. He fixes what we break. He doesn't drive. We built the ‘dozers without his help. He helped us speed them up, keeps them in top shape now.
Interviewer: Without any experience in construction or machinery, what was the motivation for starting Dozer Dudes?
Me: We got tired of the yellow swarm in the city. You drive by any construction site and it's yellow. A plague has one color, that color is yellow. Maybe you'll see other colors, but most of the construction is in yellow. We swoop in like all-stars in a game rigged against us. It's our rookie year, rookies in a big game. Even though it's a game there's one game we don't play. We're showing Big Construction there's a new guy in town who doesn't play Monopoly. He takes the Monopoly board and flips it, steps on it, kicks it across the room. Takes the pieces to the trash and throws the money in a trench. This is the philosophy that drives Dozer Dudes.
Interviewer: Dozer Dudes are up and comers in the construction world. You're making a name for yourselves by taking on contracts the larger construction companies can't fulfill fast enough, and you're doing it faster. By some accounts you're doing it better and cheaper.
Me: This isn't about money, it's about freedom.
Interviewer: One question that is raised by your company's philosophy, that is hard to find an answer to, given the work you are taking on, is what exactly Dozer Dudes are fighting against. You say the problem is yellow, meaning the color of the construction equipment, most of which is produced by Caterpillar, or other manufacturers using a yellow design, which is popular for construction equipment around the world. The work you take on is instead taking contracts away from the construction companies, not the manufacturers of the yellow equipment. Who are you fighting against? The manufacturers or the construction companies?
Me: What a great question. Both. We're waging war against both.
Interviewer: But if that is the case, are you really fighting against a monopoly? There are dozens of construction companies in the city.
Me: Yes, that is the case. We are fighting the construction companies because these companies financially support the manufacturers who dominate the industry. We have to start at the bottom and fight our way up. The plan is to take out everyone who gets in the way, which right now is the construction companies. When our profits are high enough we invest in building new machines, not just bulldozers, but all sorts of construction equipment, and at that point, we've dominated the construction game, shown ourselves to be the best in the arena, and we'll have the equipment to do more than 'dozing, we can do crane work, backhoe work, demolition, dump-trucking, anything the job demands. Everyone sees we do 'dozing the best, they'll know we can do the others best. Then we move up, we become suppliers, replacing the yellow equipment around the world.
Interviewer: If you wipe out the companies doing construction, who will you supply with your equipment once you reach that phase?
Me: We haven't thought that far ahead.
Interviewer: If you're the only company left to do construction, and the only company left supplying construction equipment, you'll only be supplying yourselves. You'll become the monopoly you wanted to break apart, but a double monopoly: a monopoly of construction and a monopoly of equipment manufacturing. Wouldn’t that be worse?
Me: That's ridiculous. This is war we're talking about. We’ll think about the future later.
The interview went a little longer, we got into a tiff, and the interviewer, she was a good looking girl, she apologized for egging me on and I told her it didn’t bother me. When it was over we had additional exchanges, off the record. We walked outside onto the city streets in cold Christmastime weather.
Me: It’s cold outside and I didn’t bring any gloves. Is there any part of your body my fingers can crawl into to stay warm?
Interviewer: I like it when you’re the one asking questions.
Being a businessman and a bulldozer rider gave me a new sensitivity and power, and I tapped into this power when I could. It took me to a lot of beds and a lot of hot tubs and a lot of back seats. Soon as a newspaper girl starts asking me about the business, I can see it in her eyes she wants to go for a ride. We curl in on each other, like a pair of warm blooded snakes trying to squeeze the other into the grave.
Not everyone took kindly to our rise to power. By this point in the story you’ve guessed it all seems too good to be true. Well it wasn’t. It was good and it was true. But trouble was brewing. Trouble that we knew would find us.
A sun drenched morning sometime in May, a little over a year after we first concocted our plan of construction deconstruction, and a week after the papers threw our story into the world, we rolled onto the site of our biggest job to date. An interstate was to be widened, and Dozer Dudes were the dudes with the contract to clear the way. Unlike our other contracts, this one found us before it found anyone else. It was offered to us, we didn’t swoop in and take it from some other company. It felt good to be first takers. It was a bigger job than we expected. When we arrived to the site and saw what was to be done, it put a fire in our pants. Totino had planned it all out and assured us we could do the clearing in a month. We got to work.
We worked hard through the morning, under the biting sun, clearing acres of land to be beautified by pavement and cement.
Creatine pulled off one of the flashiest bulldozer maneuvers I’d ever seen, riding on two wheels, tossing a mound of dirt in the air with the shovel, switching to balance on the opposite two wheels then spinning a 180 and switching to full reverse, catching the dirt and hauling it backwards to the pile, tossing it over the dozer cabin, right into the mound, nothing but dirt. What a move. You don’t think of bulldozers as graceful machines until you see an artist behind the wheel.
Gregory brought his wife Dorothine along to sit in a lawn chair and drink wine and watch us while we worked. It was their anniversary. He traded kisses with her while he worked, never slowing down. This is how they spent all their anniversaries: close but not too close. Happy, but not too happy.
It was a morning of high spirits and productive, provocative dozing.
Afternoon rolled in, and with it came a dark cloud of lightning and thunder that blew our sweat off into the wind. Not a real cloud with real lightning and thunder, I mean a figurative one, with those things figuratively, because what rolled in was a pack of yellow bulldozers and construction site foot soldiers, armored under hard hats and sunglasses and sunbaked skin. This was muscle, pure corporate construction muscle, marching onto the battlefield in search of a fight.
We stopped our work and pulled our bulldozers into their path.
Soon as the yellow bulldozers and marching soldiers came to a stop in the heavy blowing clouds of dust they threw up, a mean looking man with a mustache and sunglasses stepped forward. I knew why they were here.
“Let me talk to the guy in charge,” he said. He sounded like he was the guy in charge everywhere he went. A burning cigar hung out of his mouth.
Totino walked out of the camper he sometimes brought to our work sites. He flattened his hair and presented himself to the mustached stranger with an outstretched hand, saying something to the effect of, “We’re all in charge here, we’re a team.”
The stranger slapped away Totino’s hand and pulled his sunglasses down just far enough to let his eyes make contact with Totino’s. Before that moment if I had heard someone describe a look as a menacing glare I couldn’t be sure I knew what they meant. Now I knew. The stranger took out his cigar and blew smoke in Totino’s face, and spit at his feet.
“Your team, then, as it happens, is about to be shattered into a million little pieces. We hear you boys like taking what’s not yours, and doing jobs that aren’t yours to do. So we’ve come to bring equilibrium back to the world. This operation of yours is over.”
“Fighting words if ever I’ve heard them!” Gregory said, climbing out of his machine. He snapped his knuckles, cracked his neck, and stretched his arms like he was stepping into a rumble.
“Come over here,” said the man. “I‘ve enough spit for you, too.”
Creatine jumped out of his bulldozer and landed face first on the ground, but picked himself up quick, saying, “You gonna spit on me, too? Come on, gimme some of your mouth juices, buddy. I like a wet mouth.”
I converged on this showdown, coming up beside Totino, and put my arm on his shoulder and played stupid. “What’s the problem, here? You gentlemen lost?” He didn’t give his name or his title, but I knew what he was — Big Construction incarnate.
He looked at me, eyes having returned behind the safety of his sunglasses, so I can’t say what sort of tricks they were playing, if they were dancing up and down me or not, gauging the threat or simply staring me down. All I know is sunglasses are good for hiding a coward’s eyes.
“Gentlemen?” he said, pulling his sunglasses down an inch. “What makes you think there aren’t any ladies on these magnificent machines behind me? Are the Dozer Dudes sexist as well as warmongers?”
“Bring out your ladies,” I challenged. He was quiet for a time. He looked back at his posse, and for the first time I looked too, I mean really looked, attentively, through the cloud of dust. There were a dozen or so big and tough bulldozers, none built by their operators, all constructed by corporate factories. Dudes were sitting in the pilot’s chairs, all of them. Dudes with sunglasses, dudes with cigarettes or cigars in their mouths. Dudes with sleeveless shirts or sleeves rolled up. Dudes with hair on their faces. He had brought an army. You don’t bring an army if you aren’t looking for a war. Finally he turned back to me, blew some smoke, and said, “No ladies today. But ladies can work construction just like a man.”
“What are you tryin to pull?” said Dorothine, suddenly right behind us, nudging herself through the tiny space between Greg and Creatine. I spun around and caught the gleam of afternoon Chardonnay in her eye, an omen we knew well.
“Ma’am,” the stranger said, unshaken. “You know better than any of us what women are capable of.”
“How th’hell do you know what I know?”
He was unaffected. “I would have brought a team of women with me today, you can bet on it. As it happens, I got to thinking these Dozer Dudes would be more intimidated by men. And I was right, because the Dozer Dudes are misogynists, as their generalizing language proves. I’ve brought men with me today because war is a man’s game. If women ruled the world there’d be no war, lots of peace instead. As it happens, men declared this war and better men have come to finish it.”
The crystalware in her mind fell from a high shelf, shattered on the floor of her brain. Chardonnay went everywhere; on the walls and the floor and the shelves and the linens and the pillows of her consciousness. Collectively, the Dozer Dudes stepped back while Dorothine lunged forward, claws out, at the stranger’s neck. This was not the war he had counted on.
She was on him like a wolf, and they fell back into the thick cloud of dust, kicking up more and more of it, until we saw nothing but dirt and could gauge the carnage only by its sound. Greg restrained himself for a minute, gave us a helpless smile, but when the ravaging seemed to reach a fevered pitch he rushed into the dust to pull his wife off our visitor. The rest of us stood our ground and waited. Dorothine’s shrieks were the only thing emerging from that cloud for some time. Then the muffled sounds of men’s voices, some clamoring, if you know what clamoring sounds like, and then silence. The dust cloud slowly dissipated until we saw Greg pulling Dorothine from the scene, now calm and subdued, throwing contemptuous looks back over her shoulder. They came through the clearing dust, then went past us, to Totino’s camper. When more of the dust had cleared, we saw the stranger being helped to his feet by a few of his pals, who brushed him off, straightened him out, and encouraged him with morale-boosting whoops and high-fives and pats on the back. Go get ‘em, knock ‘em dead.
Such positivity had a puzzling effect on us. Seeing, or at least hearing, a man take a beating like that and then get up, dust himself off, and march back into the presence of his enemies had a way of taking the wind out of your sails. Briefly, Dorothine’s violence had seemed to be our victory. All it did was give our visitor an instant character arc, a display of perseverance and resilience. Now we had to face him ourselves, and it was a stronger, meaner, more hard-boiled version of him.
His face was bloody, his sunglasses broken, his shirt torn, breathing heavy. Tobacco from his cigar was smeared over his wounds.
Greg emerged from the camper and announced Dorothine was resting. He returned to the confrontation, apologizing to Big Construction Incarnate for the altercation.
“The lioness gives a good warm-up,” the torn up stranger said. He spit blood on the ground. “First we meant to drive you from this city. Now it seems more fitting to crush you completely, so you don’t bring your poison to any other town.” Then he raised his arm and put on a mean grin, like he was a schoolboy who had just thought of a question. Evidently it was a signal. The ground quaked with the kinds of vibrations only a behemoth of engines can produce. Somehow we hadn’t seen it before, but it rolled out from some shroud of invisibility right into our worksite — a mega-bulldozer. Or more precisely, the Acco Super Bulldozer, Italy’s answer to the age-old question: “Who can create the world’s most enormous Goliath of a bulldozer?” And of course it was yellow.
Its driver sat a basketball goal’s height off the ground. This thing thundered toward us, and the wall of lesser bulldozers parted like the Red Sea for its passage, like a line of children letting their disgruntled mother into the foray. It stopped just short of the stranger, who now became a tiny cricket in this machine’s presence. We were all crickets.
“If the world cared enough to give the Dozer Dudes a burial,” the stranger said, “what would you want carved in your tombstone?” Before we could answer, he pointed at our bulldozers. The Super Bulldozer spun to face them, then started moving in their direction. We knew its intentions, its bloodsoaked dreams of our demise. It saw itself as the apex predator and our homemade bulldozers as its prey. No way, man.
Once again in a collective motion, the Dozer Dudes ran toward the machines, our brains locked into a mode reserved for samurais, an instinct for defense and survival and combat. We hopped in and kicked our bulldozers into gear, saw the blazing behemoth bulldozer closing in on us with a Crush - Kill - Destroy desire, and we roared out of its path. Destruction averted, at least momentarily.
But the other bulldozers jumped into action. The dozen yellow machines accompanying our nameless enemy drove at our group, approximately four on each of us. We broke away from each other, in different directions, clearing new paths in our work zone way ahead of schedule. We rode like the masters and commanders we had become, defensive and agile and aware, artists on machines of power outmaneuvering the clumsy yellow monsters. They swarmed us, showing their military-inspired tactics, clearly trying to drive us into the path of the Super Bulldozer, into Mother’s maw, which groaned along like a sluggish dragon waiting for its children to deliver its food.
Creatine pulled some outrageous moves to disorient his pursuers, weaving around the granite columns that held up a mighty bridge not far from our work site. He did tank turns, disk swirls, bunny hops, then a zigzag wanderer through a fence. I lost sight of him soon after. Greg lured his hunters down a narrow passage between buildings, a series of corridors and labyrinths and alleyways, and I could hear their screams.
I took to the freeway. In the dirt and uneven terrain my chasers kept right on my tail, but once we hit pavement my bulldozer’s superior engine took me flying. Maverick supersonic. Traffic was shit, so I wasn’t able to roar off into the distance. We filled the interstate with bulldozers, mine a charming green and white, theirs a swarm of yellow barbarians. Two pickup trucks were hogging the lane I needed to merge into. I could slow down to let them pass, and risk being crushed by the coming yellow wave, or dominate the field. I went with the second option and veered into the lane I needed, sending both trucks whirling out of control into the other lanes.
Mastery of a bulldozer means mastery of yourself and your heart and your mind, so my nerves were calm, my pulse relaxed, and my mind clear of distraction. I was in a state of transcendental escape. I was gliding fearless. Despite the density of traffic, I navigated the interstate smoothly and without further collision with its travelers, sailing the concrete. All sound was muted, I could hear only my blood slowly moving in my head. I was in sync with the machine. I moved as necessary to put distance between me and the yellow, who looked to be having a hell of a time trying to get anywhere. Afternoon congestion blocked their passage, and even though these villains plowed through the vehicles who blocked their path, they were too slow and heavy to catch me.
I had achieved such a deep connection with my machine that I closed my eyes and sailed along without sight, unscathed. The soft hum of peace filled me. I don’t know how long I stayed like this, but when I opened my eyes the traffic had cleared. I was on a mostly empty freeway, only a car here and there, and my pursuers were nowhere to be seen. I entered a tunnel, and the roar of my bulldozer echoed maddeningly, magnified and powerful, as though announcing victory. The soft hum that filled me started to dissipate as I reached the end of the tunnel. Before the hum was gone, there came a rumbling, some awful rumbling that was too familiar to ignore. It grew stronger as the tunnel’s end grew nearer, and as my eyes adjusted to the flash of sunlight I saw, in slow motion, two Super Bulldozers converging on me, from either side of the interstate just outside the tunnel. I zoomed out of the tunnel and closed in on a rapidly closing gap between two gargantuan bulldozer shovels in my path.
My bulldozer was grazed by these shovels so intensely that the wheels were shredded, the metal siding was ripped from the hull, and sparks flew, twisted metal was thrown into the sky. The entire machine flipped over itself, crushing the driver’s cabin. After the wrangled metal mess grinded to a halt in the interstate, I pulled myself from its wreckage and bolted away. I thought I heard the laughter of the stranger behind me, but I never looked.
I was in such an overloaded mental state that I lost the next few moments and the passage of time faded from my awareness. The next thing I remember is running through the backyards of my neighborhood, between houses and garages, away from barking dogs, the smell of gasoline and oil strong in my nose, breathless and sweaty, until stumbling out into my street, my house in view. The sun was still up, the air was warm, and my chest was close to exploding.
My garage door was open when I got there. I came in and collapsed. Greg and Creatine were there, both bruised and dirty. I didn’t see their bulldozers. All I needed to know I could gather from their faces. We had lost. Our bulldozers were wrecked, our business was dead, our mission a failure.
Totino arrived a little while later, and brought Dorothine with him. She had rebounded from her episode and was relaxed, but evidently had been crying. Gregory explained the situation to them — his bulldozer was lying in ruins somewhere between the 44th street bridge and the cemetery. Creatine’s had been lost by his own flagrant driving, having tumbled down a cliff just after he jumped out to the safety of a bed of rocks. I told them of my own destruction, too.
We lamented our failures for only a little while. The rest of that night we drank gin and wine and reminisced about our glories. We’d had a lot of them. We shared our favorite stories from the Dozer Dudes days, here at their abrupt end. None of us knew what happened to the stranger and his entourage of mean bulldozer warriors. We would never find out. They faded away into the dust they had thrown into the air. The only sign of their coming was our destruction.
The next day we canceled our contract on the highway job. We canceled all our scheduled jobs and liquidated the company assets, which was now no more than a camper and a few tools. We tried salvaging the parts from our wrecked machines in the next few days, but it was hopeless. Our beautiful beasts were asleep forever.
Yellow machines came back to construction sites around the city. The papers didn’t contact us for interviews. Our phones still rang for a few days more, and we let our potential customers down with the bad news. Totino returned to retirement and we didn’t see him anymore. Creatine went back to furniture sales and Gregory, once he emerged from the funk we all sank into over the next days, started having sex with his wife again. The world turned as it did before. I kept my garage in the same state of disarray it had been in at the peak of our success, like a monument to our triumphs and spirit. I spent less and less time in there as the weeks dragged on, with nothing to fix or build or do. I would look at the pieces of metal that had once been on the huge roaring beasts that carried us like chariots, and I would leave them where they were, turn off the lights and go watch TV.
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