“No, it's a cement... cement for the stadium we're presentin' the French Nation. Ain't you read in the 'Stars and Stripes' about it?”
“I'd present 'em with a swift kick, and a hell of a lot of other people, too.”
“So we have to sweat unloadin' cement all day,” muttered Hoggenback, “to give these goddam frawgs a stadium.”
“If it weren't that it'd be somethin' else.”
“But, ain't we got folks at home to work for?” cried Hoggenback. “Mightn't all this sweat be doin' some good for us? Building a stadium! My gawd!”
“Pile out there.... Quick!” rasped a voice from the driver's seat.
Through the haze of choking white dust, Andrews got now and then a glimpse of the grey-green river, with its tugboats sporting their white cockades of steam and their long trailing plumes of smoke, and its blunt-nosed barges and its bridges, where people walked jauntily back and forth, going about their business, going where they wanted to go. The bags of cement were very heavy, and the unaccustomed work sent racking pains through his back. The biting dust stung under his finger nails, and in his mouth and eyes. All the morning a sort of refrain went through his head: “People have spent their lives... doing only this. People have spent their lives doing only this.” As he crossed and recrossed the narrow plank from the barge to the shore, he looked at the black water speeding seawards and took extraordinary care not to let his foot slip. He did not know why, for one-half of him was thinking how wonderful it would be to drown, to forget in eternal black silence the hopeless struggle. Once he saw the Kid standing before the sergeant in charge in an attitude of complete exhaustion, and caught a glint of his blue eyes as he looked up appealingly, looking like a child begging out of a spanking. The sight amused him, and he said to himself: “If I had pink cheeks and cupid's bow lips, I might be able to go through life on my blue eyes”; and he pictured the Kid, a fat, cherubic old man, stepping out of a white limousine, the way people do in the movies, and looking about him with those same mild blue eyes. But soon he forgot everything in the agony of the heavy cement bags bearing down on his back and hips.
In the truck on the way back to the mess the Kid, looking fresh and smiling among the sweating men, like ghosts from the white dust, talking hoarsely above the clatter of the truck, sidled up very close to Andrews.
“D'you like swimmin', Skinny?”
“Yes. I'd give a lot to get some of this cement dust off me,” said Andrews, without interest.