My first day, and I was already late filling out my time card. The yard looked deserted as the sun rose and flashed off the pipe. I spotted a shack off in the distance with steam skeining off the roof and headed in its general direction. Along the way I sensed multiple pairs of eyes following me, though I didn't see a soul and the place was as quiet as a confessional. I stopped by a pile of loose PVC to retie a boot lace and found myself looking into a pair of eyes peering out from underneath a green hard hat. They belonged to a black guy who didn't look too happy to see me.
"Jesus Christ," he muttered, scanning the fence perimeter as if he expected the national guard to storm the place. "Get the fuck out of my view."
I looked around, but all I could see were more pilings and a raw-toothed bit for a boring drill that had spit its teeth.
"Find a place yet?"
He sounded like he knew what he was talking about, so I said, "Not yet."
"Need some help?" He stood up to his full height, a six-foot-six toothpick working his gargantuan boot in a toe-tapping nervous pattern.
"Who are you looking for?" I asked.
"White hats. Day shift ranks. Big wigs parading around like they know jack-shit about building this monster. Leave it to them and you'd have nuclear meltdown." These pearls of wisdom dropped onto my lap, he hunkered down once more behind his bastion of plastic camouflage, burrowing like a bear into a comfortable nook padded with jackets. "I'll find you a spot. But don't say nothin'. Some days I get stuck working a double and I might need it."
I nodded.
"Check out that gravel pit. Twenty feet back there's a maze of concrete block and wooden pallets. Duck in there--you're invisible. It's got a clear shot of both gates. Blocks the wind coming off the water. I'd be there now, but I promised Joe a poker hand."
"Thanks." I gave him the thumbs up and continued on toward the shack, the sign above it in red scribbled paint read: SIGN OUT ALL TOOLS. I kicked at the hard-packed dirt with my steel-toed boot and pulled a stick of cinnamon gum from my pocket.
"I wouldn't go up there now if I was you." A young welder with a shiny forehead and long yellow popcorn hair stood up from behind a steel guard rail. He had a big wad of tobacco stuffed in his cheek, which he gnawed at, letting the juices run from the corners of his mouth. He swiped at his chin with a shirt sleeve, let loose a good wad of spit, and shot me a smirk with his wooden-comb teeth. He inclined his head toward the tool shed.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Jack's backin' off in the jack room."
Jack, I found out later, was in his sixties, grizzled and spare, another wonder of the nonflouride generation, hitching up his overalls with a cursory look over his shoulder while I banged on the front window. He hadn't a clue that half the yard could see him, though by now he was old news and no one really gave a damn except when a sucker like me walked on the job.
But at the time I didn't believe it.
"Believe it." A guy who introduced himself as Drake came over. "This here's Deon." Drake's hairy belly hung down over dungarees shiny with layers of grease. His waist band was riding so low I wondered why he bothered with a belt.
I headed over to the tool shed anyway, convinced this was a first day prank for my benefit and soon everyone would come out from their hiding places and we'd all have a good laugh and get to work. Instead, Jack had a good laugh at my expense when I asked him for a work order. "You Cheek-to-Cheek's boy? Good worker. Lays his pipe nice and neat, cheek-to-cheek. I said to myself--this boy must have connections--ending up in the bone yard. I worked for your father down the boat yard. Hell of a man. Now get the hell out of here and don't bother me again unless you got a work order."
I found a hiding place. Now that I knew where to look I spotted the other forty or so men scattered throughout the yard. Apparently the south side was reserved for the sunbathers. They lay prostrate on the rocks like seals, barechested and so peaceful and unafraid of getting caught that a few were actually snoring. Some of the guys had set up communal pads, with wooden spools for chairs and crates for poker tables. The lotto men hiked through the compound every morning at seven-thirty, collecting a buck from everyone and sticking the tickets in a coffee can. On pay day the union steward would announce the winners.
There were several highlights to the day, breaks in the monotony that the men looked forward to--like the first coffee break. At 8:30 a.m. sharp the men emerged from their foxholes and waited by the service road for the coffee truck making the rounds. A smart-ass dwarf named Manuel ran it, as generous with his insults as we were with our spare change. He'd insult the hell out of the guys and they'd give it right back. Nasty stuff, but all done with the understanding that none of it mattered. Manuel took one look at my clean-shaven face and said, "What the hell's this? We hiring Coast Guard Cadets now?" I mumbled something stupid while he poured my coffee.
"Go easy on him. He's Cheek-to-Cheek's boy," someone yelled.
"Why the hell didn't you say so?" He winked at me and handed me a paper bag and a large regular coffee. I opened my bag and found he'd slipped an extra cruller in there. Three hours until lunch. Maybe it was all the waiting. It just didn't feel right.
Lunch was such a big production it had five parts to it: the anticipation that drew the men to the center of the yard fifteen minutes before the pickup truck arrived, the ride over to the quarry, the actual eating of the lunch accompanied by several cans of beer, the swimming, and finally the ride back. At the northwest edge of the construction site next to a granite hill was an old stone quarry filled with fresh water, warmer than the ocean and bottomless for diving. The Milestone Swim Club took great pride in their athletic prowess, belly flopping and dive bombing and cannonballing off the rocks at breakneck speed. The word was out, but as long as the men didn't get too drunk and showed up back in the yard on time, nobody said a damn thing.
I'm amazed we didn't all kill ourselves, what with all the drinking and diving off the top of those steep granite rocks. The welding and grinding--well--that was the easy part. The wet heat of August settled on us and the men grew restless of cards and talk. Occasionally a work order would find its way over to Joz. Then someone would have to run over to the construction site with a part, or we'd patch in a piece of pipe some engineer had undershot, or a truck would roll in with more parts and we'd stack them and Jack would pretend to do inventory. But you could feel a palpable current, just under the surface, like a hand grenade right before it explodes. Doing nothing for too long causes its own kind of grief, a lesson Rudy Lorencz learned all too well. About the biggest thing that happened that summer concerned Rudy Lorencz.
Lorencz was an oversized Korean vet with a patch over his left eye, useless since a Communist bullet had knocked it out. He claimed half Hungarian and half Russian blood and by the looks of his mitts, I believed him. He had the biggest hands I'd ever seen on a man. He kept his head shaved, but wore two black Elvis sideburns down to his neck to hide the scar, and a thick mustache. He had this gruff way about him and never entered into a conversation unless he'd been the one to initiate it. Otherwise the most you could expect from him was an occasional grunt.
When he took off the eye patch to swim it was eerie, because the right eye moved naturally, but the false eye was frozen, adding to the already tractable imbalance of his rubber-mask face. He had told his story so many times the men had it memorized, but he never grew tired of telling it. He made a beeline for me, the new guy, popping open a can of beer with his teeth, downing it in one swallow, crushing the can flat with his right paw while handing me a cold one with his left. Then he waited for respectful silence to trickle all the way down the quarry before he began.
"My whole unit was wiped out. From the North the Reds broke through the line, shooting anything that moved and everything that didn't. They knew our guys would bag a corpse to hide under, so they let loose on the ground, emptying machine gun fire on bodies dropped in the snow. I knew my only chance was to play the odds. I found a brother and lay him across me like he was my bunker and froze like the dead. Soon their fire honed in on my spot, closer and closer until I could smell their breath and taste their Lucky Strikes cigarettes I figure it was the cigarettes that saved me, 'cause they'd found those red and white packs of Lucky Strikes everyone smoked, and they were having a hell of a party lifting them off dead bodies. It must have made them lazy and besides everyone was dead and what the hell were they wasting good ammo for? At least that's what I thought they were saying. I don't speak their gook language so what the fuck do I know?
"So I figured I was out of it and they were moving on, when all of sudden my jaw catches a goddamned gook bullet--must have been dipped in acid 'cause it burned so bad I bit the ear off the poor dead bastard that saved me. The bullet went up through my jaw and out my eye. My body started to shake and I thought I was a goner. But the gook must have already turned around by then, because the next thing I know it's dusk and there's no one around. Another unit dug me out the next day. Cold kept me from bleeding to death. The army sent me home with a medical, awarded me the bronze star." He waited for my reaction, drawing on a Lucky Strike and gazing out into the water.
I liked the guy. There was something about him--his irreverence, for one thing. He cut through all the bull shit and got to the point.
I hung on to the back of the pickup as it bounced along the gravel road headed back to the bone yard. The men were gearing up for afternoon siestas; I could tell by the yawn epidemic that followed. I felt like a nap too. I found a spot quickly and lay back in the comfort of the shade and closed my eyes. I must have slept, for how long I don't know, when Joz jabbed me in the ribs and said, "Wake up. There's a work order."
That was such a rare event we had actually resorted to circulating the papers among us. This job called for three of us, and it was Rudy, myself, and Deon who hiked up to the main construction site. My father was busy with a clip board, shouting up to the men on the scaffolding, "Make goddamn sure you hook in." It was loud. Machines going, men yelling and swearing, dust flying so thick it looked like a swarm of black locusts devouring a field. We stayed on the ground. The easy part, not like those guys a hundred feet up. The crane did the work and all we had to do was rig a metal cable sling around the steel pipe with a choke knot and give the thumbs up signal.
I wished I hadn't had three beers. It was one thing to snore away the afternoon, quite another to be handling these slippery suckers with our gloved hands, hoping we'd get the knot around before the operating engineer hit the juice. Rudy took the lead, which was a damn good thing, because I'd never seen it done before.
"Watch this, kid," he yelled.
I watched as he waited for the boom to lower down to his waist. He steadied the pipe with his left hand and had the right one inside the sling, testing the choke knot. The crane operator must have seen him give the okay; he must have gotten the signal, why else would he have tightened it up with Rudy's finger still in it and the rest of him standing there in mute shock while the blood gushed from his appendage and all hell broke loose on site. I backed up involuntarily, sickened by the sight of so much blood, his eyes rolling back, the crane going dead. The sudden near quiet. Someone caught him before he hit the ground. Someone else ripped off their shirt and wound it around the stump that was left, his real one crumbled to silt by the strength of that sling.
Sometimes I think about how it could have been me. I graduated from medical school last year, found a residency at Bethesda Naval in orthopedic surgery. It could have been my finger. But I know those guys. After working four summers I know. Not one of them would have let me go first. Because they knew the danger. And I was Cheek-to-Cheek's boy. And they were men.
Rudy still works the pipe. Came back to work the very next day, got drunk as a grunt on leave by noon and slept away the rest of the summer. The insurance company cut him a check for his finger. The following summer he was bragging about a new Harley. Asked me if I wanted to go for a ride sometime. I said, no thanks. He sure loved that Harley.
