Roar from the foreman: “You, Bratislaw! Keep your fucking mind on the fucking job!” Bratislaw grunted and shifted position a little as the winch took a little more strain on the cable, and the rest of the crew leaned muscle against the cold, wet wind. All of them were sneaking looks at the same thing—not at the cable that curved up to the steelwork over Battery Park, but at the union guy, standing on top of the deadweight and hassling with an engineer from the contractors. She wasn’t dressed for the weather, and the crew appreciated that; jeans hugged her hips lovingly, and so did their eyes.
The diesel blatted, the winch turned, the ratchet thudded, the foreman yelled: “God damn it, I said watch it! You, Carmen! Take the handlever in case it slips!” The old winchman looked up and nodded. He changed places with Bratislaw, the two of them sliding as they moved. The steel-toed shoes didn’t grip the surface, and the wind was blowing—no, it was pouring—down the Hudson Valley. Almost all of it seemed to be funneled right to the little artificial island between Ellis and Governor’s where the cable crew was putting stress on the line. You would expect that by nearly April things would be warming up a little. They weren’t. The dirty gray waves broke into dirty gray foam that froze the crew as it splashed them. And the splashes stank.
“Watch it!”
The ratchet clicked over and hesitated before catching, and the whole crew yelled and scrambled for footing. But it was all right, and the crew boss, studying his strain gauges, ordered them to hold up for a minute. Ella Jennalec glanced down at the crew with a thumb and a grin, and went back to arguing bonus rates with the construction company’s man.
The crew including Bratislaw—his friends called him Jeff, short for JFK—was reeving the cable-ends sunk into the deadfall to the spools of cable that, before long, would be pulled up the master line to the truncated top of the old World Trade Center, a kilometer and a half away and nearly half a kilometer straight up. It was hard work. Donkey work. Machines made it possible, but not easy. It took muscles. It took big men like Bratislaw and Carmen, and once in a great while a big woman like Merrimee, the old black grandmother. About a quarter of the crew wound up with a hernia after a year or two. For that kind of work Jeff Bratislaw was well prepared. He had spent his childhood on a dying Wisconsin dairy farm. It accustomed him to hard physical work in bad weather, because the cows had to be fed whether it was balmy June or blizzard time. When the warming winds had scoured the plains dry he came to New York, and found the hardest work in the city was child’s play after the herds.
“Take another notch,” the gang boss ordered, and the winchman started up the diesel.
The alloy-steel cable would have to stand a strain of more than two hundred kilograms to the square centimeter and would have to stay exposed to the outside weather for fifty years. It was big and tough. Each strand of the cable had been frayed out, so that it looked like a steel fright wig. The individual strands were fed into a coupler, which consisted of a squat cylindrical steel barrel, with spikes projecting from a diaphragm inside. Once both cables had been matched in the coupler it was Jeff’s job to hold the ends in contact while the linkup crew tightened down the cylinder. Then, as the coupler began to take the strain from the main length of the master line, to ease up on the clamps just enough to let the cable pull itself together. Hard work, yes, and dirty; but it was thirty-three-fifty an hour, and you didn’t get that on a played-out dairy farm in Wisconsin.
But it wasn’t enough for Heidi to quit working and have a baby on, and Jeff knew that very well because Heidi had pointed it out to him every day for the past two months.
So, as soon as the foreman nodded that all was secured for the moment, while the engineers argued over the strain-gauge readings, Jeff waved at his union rep. “Ella? I got to talk to you a minute.”
She nodded and winked, and went right back to the hassle with the guys from the construction company. Whatever that was. Jeff leaned forward and spat into the cold Bay, and pulled his peajacket closer around him.
There was always a hassle. There always would be a hassle, for the next twenty years, he bet. When the Blister was built it would cover almost all of the island of Manhattan, and they said it would save sixty skintillion cubic feet of natural gas every year. Probably it would. But it was going to cost plenty of gas every day of every one of those years, because every union in the city was going to have to take some and give some, and most of all change some. Doming the city was going to change the way the city worked. Sanitation men wouldn’t use trucks any more. Firemen were going to have a vertical city to deal with. Cops wouldn’t have squad cars. Nobody else would have cars, either, because public transportation would be the only way to go, and a lot of the ways would be up and down; the transit workers and the elevator operators were squabbling that one out now, which was why Jeff had had to climb twenty-six flights to get to bed last night. But most of all and right now, it was a problem for the construction unions, because no job like this had ever been done anywhere before. Because what was it that they were doing? The skeleton of the dome was braced by cables—bridges had cables—so the old International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Iron Workers filed a claim. But it was also like putting up a big auditorium dome, so Building, Concrete, Excavating and Common Laborers took an interest; and the artificial islands had to be built on caissons, so here came the Compressed Air Workers, and the final product would be transparent, so there were the Glaziers; and the Blasters, Drillers and Miners; and the Stationary Engineers; and, because a few of the tallest skyscrapers at the fringes had to come down or be chopped shorter, the House Wreckers; and because of all the servomachinery, the Machinists and Aerospace Workers—and about a hundred more—and then the Teamsters came in and offered to represent them all; and when you thought it out, Ella Jennalec’s bunch had saved everybody a lot of headaches by putting together the One Big Union merger. The city liked it, because they only had one union to deal with. The builders liked it, because the city did most of the dealing. The workers liked it, because they didn’t have to worry about which union to join; in fact everybody liked it, with the possible exceptions of the ABS and O.A.W., the C.A.W., the Glaziers, the Blasters and the Teamsters. They hadn’t liked it at all, but they had been helped to get used to it through the hard work of some of the middle-management types like Ella Jennalec’s associate, standing up there on the deadweight with her and the engineers. His name was Tiny, and he was taller than Jeff Bratislaw and heavier, and his scarred knuckles said he was probably better in other respects, too. In the table of organization of the new Elevated Structures, Tunnels & Approach Workers he was down as a clerk-typist. He probably might have been, once. But not any more, with those hands.
“Take five,” growled the gang boss as the engineers finished their battle with Ella and beckoned to him. Ella herself hopped down beside Jeff, catching herself with his arm as she hit the slippery concrete.
“How they hanging, stud?” she grinned. “You want to see me?”
“Yeah. I’m Jeff Bratislaw—you know, we mambaed at the New Year’s dance at the local—”
“I remember. You move good, Jeff Bratislaw.”
“Well, I need a better job than this. Thirty-three-fifty won’t make it any more, and I was thinking about deckhand on one of those tugs that keep people away.”
“Come on, Jeff! Not our jurisdiction, a good union brother ought to know that.” The EST&A Workers owned all the jobs that touched any part of the dome itself or its outliers, but the harbor tugs were outside their law.
“Then demolition, maybe.” He jerked his head toward the diminishing southern shaft of the World Trade Center. “I hear those guys get forty-eight bucks an hour, portal to portal.”
“And some of them don’t make it through the first hour, asshole,” she said cheerfully. “You ever try to take apart a prestressed concrete girder? You got a wife, don’t you? Why do you want to make her a widow?”
“I want to make her a mother, Ella, but to do that I
need more dough.”
“To do that,” she grinned, “all you need is what you already got, and when we was mambaing I noticed you got plenty.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Yeah.” She cut him off. “I ain’t saying no, Jeff, but right now I got plenty of things to take care of. These jerks wanted to cut out hazard pay for your job, did you know that? And then there’s that Grand Jury thing coming up. But listen, not demolition. Nobody knows where the tensioned cables are in those girders any more. You ever see a bomb go off? That’s what it’s like. I got twenty-two compensation cases right now from the top ten stories alone. And—”
She was stalling him, Jeff knew; but the stalling stopped.
Her hired muscle, Tiny, was edging her gradually toward the tied-up launch waiting to take them back to South Ferry; the engineers were listening frostily to explanations from the gang boss; no one was watching the winch. And the cable, stretching slowly, gave just enough of a fraction of a centimeter to make the ratchet slip one notch.
This time Carmen was watching the gang boss instead of his hand lever. The elasticity of the steel spun the geared-down hand drum a quarter turn for that one ratchet notch. The lever hurtled out of its socket.
Jeff Bratislaw heard the click and saw the drum begin to move. He dove for cover, sweeping Ella with him. Tiny, a fraction of a second later, jumped too, but he was big and heavy for fast movement on the sleet-sprayed concrete. He fell sprawling, just as the hand lever flew a hundred meters through the stormy air before it splashed into the bay. Jeff was suddenly colder than the air around him. Two seconds earlier he was standing right in the path of that two-meter shaft of hard metal, and if that had struck his head what would have been left of it, hard hat or none?
“The hell,” Ella said shakily, getting up. “Maybe demolition’s not so bad after all. Thanks, Bratislaw.”
You took your chances when they came. “So what about a transfer?” he demanded.
But she wasn’t looking at him, she was staring at Tiny, sprawled on the slick concrete and sobbing, with one leg bent in a way that legs didn’t bend.
Everybody was yelling at everybody else, but they got together enough to gentle Tiny into the launch, even though he screamed when they lifted him. Ella hopped in after him. Before it pulled away she lifted her face to call to Jeff Bratislaw: “Looks like there’s a vacancy. Report to my apartment eight o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ll try you out for a week, anyway.”
II
The elevators were running—the day was staying good. As soon as Jeff got back to his apartment he dropped his clothes in the bathroom and, stark naked, padded to the kitchen to make dinner. There was a note fastened to the refrigerator door with a magnetic clip: Not fish again, please? A little heart was drawn below it for a signature. Jeff considered his options, holding the freezer door open, and finally pulled out two large Salisbury steaks, part of the batch he had made the week before, each in its individual pouch. They were made out of one hundred per cent meat; hell, it was a day worth celebrating! He pulled out three large carrots and a couple of potatoes, then took an empty pouch out of the hardware drawer and put it on the drainboard. A pot of hot water went on the stove, and while it was coming to a boil he put on the scraping gloves and rubbed the skins off the vegetables. They were nearly blemishless, city grown in the big sand-trays that used reject hot water from the 14th Street powerplant. He chopped them all into slices with the cleaver, and potatoes and carrots went together into the pouch, along with a chunk of butter and a sprinkling of salt, pepper and dried parsley. He zipped up the pouch and dropped it into the boiling water, set the timer and took his quick shower.
By the time he was out of the shower it was time to put the frozen meat in the same pot. He reset the timer, shaved, pulled on slacks and a tunic and had started mixing drinks when the bell rang.
Heidi didn’t usually ring the bell; he peered through the peephole and saw a blurry female figure in a police uniform. “Hey there, Lucy,” he said, opening the door; it was his wife’s sister. “Didn’t expect to see you tonight. You want to stay for dinner?” There was another steak in the freezer, and the vegetables, he calculated quickly, would stretch.
“I can’t, Jeff. I won’t even come in.” But she did, just far enough to let him close the door. “I’m on duty, but I stopped off to see if you wanted to sign the petition now.”
“What petition?” He knew, well enough; he just didn’t want her to bring him down with talk about corruption in the city.
“For a Citizens’ Grand Jury to investigate the Grand Jury—you know! We talked about it Saturday night.”
He gazed down at the sheet of paper—two short paragraphs and then at least fifty lines for citizens’ signatures. But there were only two signatures on the page, and one of those was Lucy’s own. “Well, I don’t know, Lucy,” he said. “I could get in trouble with this—so could you, you know. Specially if you’re canvassing when you’re on duty.”
“I’m not canvassing, Jeff, I’m just dropping this off, and I had to be in the building anyway—it’s part of my beat. Look, I’ll just leave it for you and Heidi, okay? And I’ll come by for it when I go off duty.”
“See you later,” he said, which was not a commitment. He didn’t see any way out of it, though. Lucy was the do-gooder in the family, an honest cop, never took a nickel or an apple; and Heidi was too proud of her to turn her down on a thing like that. And if Heidi signed, he might as well sign himself; the people that would get upset about signing the petition wouldn’t stop to consider whether both members of a family had signed, they would just make a little mark against the lease form, and another against the park permit, and another against the names of the Bratislaws wherever they appeared. He dropped the petition on the windowsill, staring out at the city. There were red laser lights flashing at the tops of the unfinished dome skeleton, to warn off aircraft, and it was drizzling again. It was a pretty city to look at. Why didn’t people just leave it alone?
When he heard Heidi’s key in the lock he had dinner on the table. He greeted her with a kiss. “I got the job,” he said.
“Aw, Jeff, that’s great!” She was looking tired as she came in the door, but a smile broke through the fatigue. “Tell me about it.” And then, when she took a better look at him, “Holy shit, what have you done to your face?”
He had not even known about the bruise until he was shaving. “Industrial accident,” he said. “I fell. Now listen. I’m going to be assistant to the shop steward. White-collar work. I don’t have to get into demolition, and I don’t have to pull cable in the snow.”
“And more money?”
Jeff hesitated. “Well, I don’t exactly know what the money is yet.”
She took a pull at the drink and then moved toward the dinner table. The fatigue was back on her face, along with a look of puzzlement. “Explain that to me, will you, Jeff?”
“The money’s the least part of it,” he said, dividing the pouches between their plates. “There’s plenty of fringe benefits.”
“Oh?”
“You know.” He made up his mind to tell her; she would understand; she wasn’t like her crazy sister. “When somebody wants to get a better job, you know? He comes to the union. And he pays a kind of, what would you call it, a finder’s fee to the guy who gets it for him.”
“A kickback,” she said, nodding. “You’re going to be taking kickbacks.”
“Heidi, you aren’t going to give me a hard time, are you? That’s the way the system works. You take kickbacks or you pay them—I just happen to think it’s better to take them.”
“Um.” It wasn’t agreement, but it wasn’t an argument, either.
“So are we going to do it?” he pressed.
She chewed, regarding him. Neither of them had to say what “it” was, because “it” had been a major topic of conversation for the past three months—ever since they got the genetics lab reports that showed them both fully fertile and without any seriously worr
ying defects. “Well, I’ll tell you, old man,” she said, “I would imagine we are. But let’s finish dinner first.”
Heidi was always three times as long in the shower as Jeff, which was fine with Jeff because the results were always worth it. While she was using up half their day’s water allotment, he was putting the dishes in the washer, folding up the table, pulling out the bed. He stopped himself as he packed up the organic garbage for the chute: the strike. So it would have to go into the freezer until they settled that one. He smoothed the pillows, turned down the sheets, got out of his clothes and into the dressing gown that was his signal for sexual intercourse—Heidi’s was pajama tops without the bottoms—and lit a joint, sitting on the windowsill. He could see the big Eiffel-tower sort of thing that had sprung up from Madison Square, first pylon for the dome; and he could even see, past the clutter of skyscrapers downtown, the twin lights of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, where Heidi spent her working days.
Heidi was a port dispatcher. She and the other twenty-five men and women in the control tower had charge of dispatching all of the tugs, barges, cargo vessels, workboats, dredges, pleasure boats, tour boats—everything that floated from the tip of Manhattan on the north to Sandy Hook and the Brooklyn shore on the south. Pleasure boats were the worst. Most of them did not carry radar targets, and so they could be controlled only visually. But if a pleasure boat got into trouble it was usually agile enough to get itself out of it again, and in any case the occupants were the only cargo that mattered, and they could almost always be saved in the worst case. The serious part of the work was the big bastards coming up from South America and the Gulf, and the few that came across the Atlantic, and the coasting traffic—and, above all, the barges that brought in fuel and industrial equipment. If you found two of them on a collision course you couldn’t tell them to take evasive action. They couldn’t do it. You had to think far ahead with them, point them in the right direction and sweep everything smaller and more mobile out of their way.
The Years of the City Page 17
