As the summer drew to a close, the days grew shorter and more humid. The Bennys put on a brave face, sweating out their last shot at getting a tan.

The dying sunlight lingered just above the horizon, stretching the shadows of the coniferous trees surrounding the hotel longer and longer until they were shady, swaying fingers waving good-bye to the Bennys. Business thinning out in the middle of the week meant that the hotel only reached full capacity on the weekends. It also meant fewer women. My already slim chance of getting laid at the hotel was shrinking even more.

I sat behind the hotel desk, staring out across the lawn that sat in the middle of the U. As it grew darker, the grass I had neglected to cut for the past few weeks dimmed into a shiny black. A light breeze sent it streaming in waves. The lawn looked like the surface of a deep, murky sea full of secrets.

Dinner smells and sounds of eating drifted in from the kitchen, but I was full since I’d already eaten three slices of pepperoni pizza from one of the rooms. We never ordered out because it was too expensive, so finding pizza in a room was almost as good as finding hard-core porn with a blonde in it. The pizza box had been open, lying on the bed like another suitcase to pack. I checked for cigarette ashes or butts in the box before taking a bite. The slices were cold, colder than room temperature. Oil from under the scab of cheese dripped down onto my socks. After three stiff slices, I felt a sharp, greasy pain in the right side of my stomach that moved slowly downward.

I was mentally preparing myself for another night in the crawlspace with my father, who was eating a small herd in hamburger meat. He ate a lot of meat because he said it helped him work hard.

With fewer people at the hotel, the end of the summer was the best time to get renovations done. And there was a hell of a lot of work to do. When it was busy, bathroom fixtures and parts of the floor stayed broken for practically the entire summer simply because the rooms were never vacant long enough to fix up. Angry or drunk men liked to punch holes in closet doors or kick in the sheetrock walls. These were pretty easy to fix with a little putty mix, but we wouldn’t repaint the patches until September. Then I would go around with a pail and a dropcloth, getting all of them in one shot. In the meantime, some rooms looked like they had been draped in giraffe skin because there were so many patches.

I yawned and cringed at the pain in my stomach. I hoped the pizza had been okay to eat. I made a fist with my left hand and punched the spot hard twice. I’d learned that trick from Vincent. He used to run track in high school, and whenever he cramped up, he would just beat it out.

“It’s a psychological thing,” he said. “When the pain from the punches goes away, it don’t hurt as much. If it still hurts a lot, it means you have to punch harder.”

When I heard the dreaded sound of the sink and clanking dishes, I knew dinner was over and it was time to work again. I’d be glad when school started again because then I’d have a good excuse not to work late every night. I went to get the flashlight, the lantern, and two pairs of work gloves.

My father and I were under Room 37. The wood in the bathroom floor had rotted away. We could see the telltale concentric rings of discoloration in the panels above us. I was squatting in the dirt, holding the lantern up. The orange electric cord snaked off into the darkness. The crawlspace was long and wide, but only about four feet high. If you crouch-walked too fast through it, you’d knock your head against a faucet or a bend in the pipes that ran across the top of the crawlspace. I had to hold the lantern up at an angle, otherwise the vertical slats of wood would cast shadows on the work area.

My father tore at the rotted wood with the claw end of a hammer. His face, which was illuminated from below, looked meaty and sweaty. I could smell charred beef as he breathed through his mouth in time to the hammer swinging. Sometimes he had to put the hammer down to rest.

Pieces of wood flicked onto my face like insects onto a light bulb at night, and damp flakes went down the front of my shirt. I nearly lost my balance when a fat splinter fell against my eyelid. The lantern swung crazily and landed on its side.

“It’s just wood,” said my father, handing the lantern back to me. “Don’t worry about it. Just pieces of wood. Who cares?”

“But it’s rotten. It might make me sick.”

“Don’t be a fool,” he said, as his lips and eyebrows, exaggerated by the lighting, shifted between incredulity and annoyance. “Wood never make anybody sick.”

“I won’t be able to do this when school starts in two weeks.”

“Then you got a lot of work to do in next two weeks. You have to finish putty holes in even-number rooms. You have to measure the windows in Number 23 and Number 25 and get glass from hardware store. There some other things I wrote down you have to do, too.”

“I know, I have the list in my bedroom. You taped it to my closet door.”

“Next year I show you how to use blowtorch and soldering so you can make copper tubing we need for sinks. Very easy.”

“All this stuff you’re showing me you don’t even need to go to college for. Doing this makes me forget everything I learn in school. Doing this makes me stupid. I don’t want to work here the rest of my life.”

“You have to have some practical knowledge. You don’t want to learn Chinese, you don’t want to eat Chinese food, so you can learn how to fix floors. I only wish I learned something about car repair so I don’t get cheated.”

My father hated being cheated, and always felt that everyone was out to trick him. He had taken his transistor radio apart and put it back together again so he could figure out how to fix electronics and not be fooled by technicians who charged more for labor than parts. Then they started using those modified screws that you needed a special screwdriver for. That was when my father stopped buying electronics. Our stereo consisted of an old radio and a turntable built into a bulky wooden cabinet upstairs. We only had two records — the sound-track of the original cast of “Oklahoma!” and Johnny Cash’s “I Walk The Line.” Johnny Cash was the first music I’d ever heard.

I reached with my free hand for a clean new plank of wood and handed it to my father. Rotted wood, looking like strips of beef jerky, lay strewn around us on the floor, along with bent nails, pieces of cut-off pipe, and crushed beer cans from repairmen the previous owners had used. No one else was crazy enough to try to fix the place themselves.

“See here,” said my father, tapping a plastic pipe over his head. “Repairman used plastic, not copper. Try to cheat.” It made him happy that no plumbers, electricians, or construction crews would be down here in the crawlspace while we owned the place.

Two more new planks and the floor was fixed. We fixed five more floors before he let me go to sleep.

Labor Day weekend was the traditional last hurrah for the Bennys. I saw Vincent as he was stuffing t-shirts into his car trunk. Patty, who had endured another summer and was still his girlfriend, was sitting up front on the passenger side.

“Tough luck, no score for you this summer,” said Vincent. His eyes were red, and he was moving slow.

“I got a girl to jerk me off,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s a start. Something to build on. Just find some chick in school this year. They’re curious when they’re young.”

“I got someone in mind.”

“Who’s this?” he asked, wrapping an arm around my neck and walking me backwards. “Some unfuckable ugly-ass bitch?” Vincent was play-choking me, and his beer breath was knocking me out. He switched arms and shoved my nose into his sweaty, smelly armpit. Patty leaned on the horn. He loosened up on me.

“This girl, she’s beautiful.” I stammered. The horn sounded a second time. Patty screamed something but the windows were up and she sounded like she was under water.

“This shit again,” muttered Vincent, releasing me completely. “I tell ya, I come back next summer, that cherry on your cock better be gone. I’m not fuckin’ around, you know!”

He dipped into a foam cooler and fished out an open can of beer.

“Hey, you finish this,” he shouted at me, shoving the can into my gut. It was about half-empty. “Drink it!

Don’t look at me like that. Fucking drink it, pussy!” I choked down my first beer. It tasted like foamy metal. “Thought I was going to have to lock you in the trunk

to get you to drink up,” Vincent muttered as he stepped into the car.