Seven men came with a little bulldozer to pave Caroline’s parking lot. It is blazing hot August, and six men with their shirts off stand while the seventh uses the little yellow bulldozer to dig up the old pavement, or the old dirt and gravel which has hardened into something like pavement. I keep thinking the bulldozer driver is going to ram into Caroline’s parked van, or the basketball hoop, or my fence, but he doesn’t, even though he goes fast in a small space. When the bulldozer has done its work, the men get shovelsful of hot asphalt and ladle it onto the lot until it’s black and smooth. They follow each other in a loop for a while, getting the asphalt, placing it, dumping it, going back for more. Someone must be smoothing the asphalt out and making sure it is right, but I can’t see him.

Caroline’s parking lot lies, for the most part, in the shade, and the green of the trees affects the color of the naked bodies of the men. They are not green, exactly, but something cooler than the red and pink and bronze you’d expect them to be. The men take turns drinking out of a garden hose. The farthest the hose reaches is a place in full sun, so when the men come to drink, their bodies are momentarily a blaze of red shadow and white-gold light, with the plume of water from the hose almost unendurably bright. Then they go back into the shade, where they are not green, exactly, but cream and cinnamon under green silk.

They must be talking to one another–I see that they are–but the little bulldozer is too loud for me to hear them. Even though I’m sure they can’t see me watching from inside my house, I’m embarrassed, as though it were stealing from them to watch, as if I were probing a secret which could be damaged merely by being looked at too hard. When I have to go out, when I have to pass them to get to my car to go out, I see first that they do not all look alike. I thought from the distance that they did. I speak to one of them, the nearest one. I try to tell him that the new pavement looks fine, black and orderly and artificial under the green light. But what comes out of my mouth is jibberish. He looks at me, trying to decide whether I had said something he was meant to hear. I’m not sure myself. I do not repeat it. I keep walking. Some of the men are looking at the cooling pavement, and some at me.

When I return that night I see they have built a barricade of trash cans and lumber and the little bulldozer parked just so. So not anybody can get to Caroline’s parking lot just yet. So that all they accomplished might not be ruined by somebody from outside.