The Bricks

They found the bricks on a Wednesday in April, 1975, under a foot of plaster dust and lath in the east wall of the building on Sierra Street that had been the Colonial Apartments until Tuesday, when the demolition permit came through and the crew from Reno Wrecking started on the roof.

Mike Padilla was twenty-six and he had been on the crew three months. Before that he had done road work for the county and before that he had dug footings for a tract builder out in the southwest meadows where the new houses were going up so fast that the concrete trucks ran in convoys. He had come to Reno Wrecking because the foreman, a man named Engebretsen, paid a dollar more an hour and did not care what you had done before as long as you showed up on time and did not drop things on people.

The Colonial Apartments had been built in 1907. Mike knew this because someone had carved the date into the cornerstone, which was the first piece they pulled, a block of sandstone with “1907” and the name “C.E. CLOUGH” cut into it in letters that were still sharp after sixty-eight years. The stone went into the truck with everything else. Engebretsen did not save cornerstones. Engebretsen did not save anything. The contract said demolish and the contract meant demolish and what the contract did not say was remember.

But the bricks were different. The bricks were stamped.

Mike pulled the first one out of the rubble at the base of the east wall where the hydraulic claw had sheared through the structure, and he turned it over in his gloved hand and saw the letters pressed into the face of the clay, five letters, all capitals, as clear as the day they were fired: RENO.

He held it up. “Hey, Engebretsen.”

The foreman was on the far side of the lot, talking to the driver of the haul truck, but he looked over.

“These bricks say Reno on them.”

Engebretsen walked over and took the brick and looked at it the way he looked at everything on a job site, which was with the expression of a man deciding whether something was going to cost him money.

“Reno Press Brick,” he said. “They had a yard out in the Evans Addition. My grandfather bought his chimney bricks from them.”

“They still around?”

“No. The old man died in thirty-two. Clough. Same name as the cornerstone.” Engebretsen turned the brick over in his hand once and set it on the tailgate of his truck. “He built half this town. The brick yard, the power company, the water system. Before your time. Before my time. Before most people’s time.”

Mike went back to work. The claw took another bite out of the east wall and the bricks came down in a cascade, red and brown and stamped, all of them, RENO RENO RENO, hundreds of them in the rubble like a word repeating itself until it lost its meaning.

He thought about that. A man who had built a factory to make bricks and stamped the name of his town on every one. Not his own name. Not the company name. The town’s name. As if the bricks were not a product but a claim, a declaration that this place existed and was worth the trouble of making something permanent for it.

The building had been three stories, brick over wood frame, with a flat roof and narrow windows and a fire escape on the south side that had rusted so badly it pulled away from the wall when the crew hooked the chain to it. Sixty-eight years of weather and tenants and cooking smells and paint and plumbing repairs and the slow settling of a wood frame on a foundation that was never quite level, and now it was coming down in a single Wednesday, an afternoon’s work for four men and a machine.

The apartments had been fine once. Mike could see that in the details: the pressed-tin ceilings on the first floor, the wainscoting in the hallways, the tile work in the lobby that must have been handsome when it was new. Someone had cared about this building. Someone had spent more than sixty thousand dollars in 1907 money to put it up, and that someone had been C.E. Clough, the man who stamped RENO on his bricks, the man who dug the ditches for the water and strung the wires for the power and built the apartments for the people who came to live in the town that he was building around them.

By noon the east wall was down and the south wall was leaning. Engebretsen called the break and the crew sat in the shade of the haul truck and ate lunch and drank coffee from a thermos and looked at the half-demolished building the way crews look at work in progress, with the satisfaction of people who understand that destruction is its own kind of craft. You had to know where to cut. You had to know which wall was load-bearing and which was partition. You had to know when to use the claw and when to use the saw and when to use your hands. Mike had learned all of this in three months and he was still learning, and what he was learning today was that the buildings you took down had been put up by people who thought they would last.

After lunch he pulled another stamped brick from the rubble and put it in the cab of his truck. Then he pulled a second one and put it next to the first. The bricks were heavy, eight pounds each, and the clay was the color of the high desert east of town, a red-brown that was almost the color of the ground itself, as if someone had taken the earth and pressed it into shape and fired it until it was hard enough to build on and then stamped it with the name of the place it came from and the place it was going back to.

By three o’clock the building was down. The lot was flat, scraped clean, the haul trucks loaded and gone. In six weeks a parking structure would stand here, three levels of reinforced concrete, no cornerstone, no stamp, no name. The cars that parked in it would not know what had been here before them. The people who got out of the cars would not know that they were walking on ground that a man named Clough had built on in 1907 with bricks he made himself, bricks stamped with the name of a town he believed in enough to write it on everything he touched.

Mike drove home to his apartment on Plumas Street with two stamped bricks on the passenger seat. He did not know what he would do with them. He put them on the shelf above the kitchen sink, next to the coffee can and the jar of sugar, and they sat there, two bricks the color of the desert, stamped RENO, and they did not explain anything or prove anything or save anything that was already gone. They were just bricks. But they had the name on them, and the name was the name of the town, and Mike left them on the shelf because throwing them away felt like throwing away something he could not replace.

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