Free Red Sky at Morning by Richard Bradford Page B

haven't seen him this year."
    "He's in the Navy," I said. "He's in Massachusetts right now for training, and then he'll go overseas somewhere."
    "Are you as tough as old Frank?"
    "I can outrun him," I said. "I don't think I can out-wrestle him yet."
    The woman, Anna, came back into the studio and without saying anything began to rattle pots and pans in the cooking corner of the room, and to slice some salami. I stood up and thanked Mr. Bonino for his coffee and for letting me hide in his patio. "Tell Mrs. Bonino I'm sorry about staring at her." The woman said "Hah!" and kept slicing salami.
    "Sure, sure," he said. "Listen, when do you have to get home? Does your mother worry about you?"
    "No. She doesn't worry about me. I can get home any time. If those guys don't jump me again."
    "I want to take some rocks back to the mountain before dinner. It won't take long. Why don't you come with me?"
    "Some what?"
    "Come along. I'll show you."
    We left Anna with the salami and went out to his garage. He backed an old truck to the patio gate. "We'll just take the ones with faces on them," he said.
    He and I rolled and carried the boulders to the truck and hoisted them into the bed, where he'd laid some army blankets. There were seven of them, and they were heavy.
    I climbed in, and he drove out between the compound walls and northeast toward Teta Peak, so called because it was shaped like a breast, with a big pink rock nipple on top of it.
    "Anna isn't exactly Mrs. Bonino," he said after a few minutes. "She's more of a friend, and she models for me."
    "Oh, that's okay," I said, not knowing what else I should say. "She looks very nice."
    "She isn't," he said. "She's a rotten model and a bad cook, and she doesn't shave under her arms often enough and she's stupid."
    "I'm sorry," I said.
    "Don't be. We get along very well, and when she gets tired of me, or when I get tired of her, she'll go live with someone else. I'm about number fifteen for her. She's about number twenty for me."
    "Oh."
    We turned off the road and onto a rutted track that led to the foot of the hill, and stopped. "Here we are," Romeo said. "Time to sweat."
    We unloaded the carved boulders, and he chose the heaviest one to start with. "These came from up there," he said, pointing to a small clearing far above us. We got behind a boulder and began to roll it slowly uphill. When we came to a nearly level place we'd carry it together, but mostly we had to roll it. It was hard, sweaty work, and we were gasping when we reached the clearing. Romeo found a stick and scratched a shallow depression in the earth, and we rolled the carved rock into it so that it sat on what would have been a neck if he'd carved a neck. "Much better," he said, and we started down for another boulder.
    "Frank and I used to do this, sometimes," he said. "He was one of the few people who didn't think I was crazy, and he said he liked the exercise. Do you think I'm crazy?"
    "I guess not. Who are you doing this for? I mean, who owns the hill?"
    "Owns the hill? Nobody owns the hill. It belongs to the state, or the Federal government, or something. It's a public hill. I'm simply improving the land."
    We rolled rocks up the hill until the sun went down and it was too dark to see where we were going. Once, halfway up, with a boulder carved like a Negro's head, our hands slipped and it rolled downhill away from us, knocking over small trees. We scrambled after it, with Romeo screaming "Come back, come back, you son of a bitch!" He tripped and banged his knee on a root, and I tripped over him, and for a few seconds we lay there, laughing, and listening to the carved head crashing and bouncing down the slope. We found it ten minutes later, after a lot of thrashing around, and put our backs in it, and got it to its original spot.
    "Maybe my father didn't think you were crazy," I said, as we went down for another one, "but I'm not so sure."
    "As I said, I'm improving the land. I'm improving on Nature, and I don't