“At least ours is a two-parent home,” Layne always said, “and marginally functional, despite appearances.”
By the time Mick merged into the river of traffic the whole argument from the night before had come back to sit on his head. He liked his life. He liked things the way they were, and he couldn’t quite fathom how a kid licking his teacher’s ankle added up to a full-grown man, an ironworker, quitting his job.
At the time, he was working the high steel on a new sixty-story office building in downtown Atlanta. It was one of those retro designs with wedding-cake layers like the Empire State Building, except the outside was going to be all glass and no concrete. They had just poured the twelfth-floor slab and Mick’s crew was erecting the steel skeleton for the next phase. He’d been an ironworker for fifteen years, ever since high school. He never went to college and never regretted it for a minute. He loved the high steel. There was just something about working every day in a place where sane people were afraid to go. A man came alive.
That morning he went straight to the top. The weather had turned bitter cold for November and the wind up high cut right through him, but Mick still didn’t want to be anyplace else. He could have dropped in at the office trailer and stayed warm until the whistle blew, but he didn’t care anything about hanging around a bunch of ambitious young jocks fresh out of Industrial Management, arguing about college football and learning to leave paper trails.
There was freedom up there where nobody could reach him. He liked being out in the weather all day, and he liked the feel of steel in his hands. He liked looking back at the end of a hard day and being able to actually see what he had accomplished. He liked everything about the job except for the pressure brought on by a bunch of bureaucrats who could cite code sections from memory but didn’t know a spud wrench from a turnip. Truth is, those boys didn’t care whether the job got done or not, so long as they could prove it wasn’t their fault.
That particular morning Mick needed to be alone. He had tied himself in a knot thinking about doctor bills and therapy and somebody needing to stay home with Dylan. Whatever his flaws, Mick had never been indecisive—he’d rather go ahead and make a decision even if it was wrong, but this time he couldn’t see a way. For the first time in his life he just couldn’t see a way. He didn’t have an answer. Dylan was his kid, his flesh and blood, his responsibility. Layne was undeniably right about somebody needing to stay home for a while, and when he got right down to it, he could see that it didn’t make sense for her to quit her job because they’d replace her and the position would be gone for good. Mick, on the other hand, could quit for a while and get another job easily.
But staying home while his wife worked was completely unacceptable. Out of the question. His old man had left when Mick was in middle school—disappeared, no forwarding address—and never sent home a dime after that. They made it through, his brothers and mother and him, but it was tough. Layne knew that. She knew about the sweltering summer nights without electricity, and the times when they ate mac and cheese for a week. She knew Mick needed to bring home a paycheck. He needed it, because there was always the possibility that someday his old man would show up, or he’d run into him on the street, and Mick wanted to be able to punch him right in his hook nose with a clean conscience. He did not want, ever, to be that man.
So when he got to the job that morning before dawn, Mick went straight to the top and climbed up a beam—just hooked his feet into the sides and shinnied up into the dark and the wind. He knew from long experience that nothing would clear a man’s head like hanging his toes off a twelve-inch I-beam at the top of the world in a cold dawn. The wind was gusty, so he slung his lanyard around a vertical beam, snapped it onto the D-ring of his safety belt and stood there snug in his Carhartts, soaking up the whole round earth. The sun hadn’t peeked over the horizon yet, but the middle distance was striped with clouds like fish bones, and their bottoms were all lit up with a hundred different pinks and oranges and purples. When he turned the other way the same sky broke itself into pieces on the glass fronts of the towers downtown. Like a million other times when he’d been at the top of the world and seen things nobody else ever saw, he wished he had a camera with him.
At times like that he could forget where he was. He forgot the cold, the job, the honking of cars, the exhaust fumes riding on the wind. He forgot himself. He was just a bump on a steel skeleton, a nameless point that the light passed through on its way from the dawn to the city.
He hated not knowing what to do. It hurt. Standing on the dark end of the sky that morning Mick was as alone as a man could get, and he fell to wondering, like most men do sooner or later, whether there really was any point to life. A purpose, a design. Back and forth to work every day, head down, working, working, and for what? To pay for a truck so he could drive to work? To pay for his kids’ education so they could get a good job, so they could pay for their kids’ education? But that wasn’t all of it—it was way bigger than that. It felt like all the life-questions he’d ever owned came together all at once and rolled themselves into a ball too big to hold. Something welled up and burst out of him then, like a surprised bird. He didn’t know what it was. Layne might have called it a prayer, but to Mick it felt more like a sigh or a scream, a big fat burning question that words couldn’t touch.
Then the sun cracked the edge of the sky, the whistle blew, and Mick unhooked himself and slid down the steel to the twelfth-floor slab so he could get his crew lined out for the day. He felt kind of heavy and disappointed, and he supposed it was because he never got an answer. He didn’t know exactly what he expected to happen, but he had expected something. Maybe not voices from the clouds, but something.
By noon the wind died and the sun warmed the concrete, so the whole crew came down out of the steel to eat lunch on the slab. All that new concrete glared white like a desert, and it felt nice and warm after they had been up in the wind all morning. Sitting on a wire reel, Mick peeled the paper from the top of a foam cup of ramen noodles and poured hot water into it from his thermos. After fifteen winters working outside, Mick knew how to pack a lunch: a steel thermos of boiling water and a whole bunch of instant stuff. One little cooler could haul instant coffee, hot chocolate, oatmeal, grits, all kinds of soup, ramen noodles, and hot cider—all at the same time and light as a feather. An apprentice they called Pudd’n plopped down beside Mick with his brown paper sack—a ham sandwich and some potato chips. Danny Baez and an electrician named Spence sat down and spread out their lunch on another spool right there with them.
Mick and Danny had worked together for years. Sometimes Danny ran the crew and Mick worked for him, but on this job it was the other way around. It didn’t matter, really—neither of them ever pulled rank. Danny wore a beat-up old hard hat with decals all over it from places he’d been, and like all the ironworkers in the high steel he carried a pointed spud wrench in a wire hanger on his hip. Mick would never forget the first time he ever worked with Danny. They were stringing steel cable for the suspension roof on the Georgia Dome back in ’92. It was Mick’s first cable job, and Danny was the one who showed him around when he signed on. Whenever he passed a radial cable up in the rigging, Danny would take out his spud wrench, give the cable a good whack, and it would give off a high-pitched choop sound like one of those guns in Star Wars. When Mick asked him what he was doing he said he was listening.
“Everything’s got a pitch,” Danny said. “They got machines for checking tension on these cables, but I don’t trust machines. I’ve seen ’em break, seen ’em lie, seen ’em get out of calibration. I trust my ear. When I was a kid we had a sailboat, and when she was dead on and humming right down the middle of the wind she’d sing—steady as a rock, and always the same note. Everything does that, one way or another. Everything’s got a pitch. You just gotta learn how to hear it.”
Danny definitely knew what he was doing, and he was a bit of an amateur philosopher, too. That was all right with Mick, because Mick was no ordi
nary redneck. He’d always considered himself an enlightened and open-minded redneck, and he understood that there was nothing wrong with a man having deep thoughts as long as he kept them to himself.
When they sat down to lunch that day, nobody said anything until Danny bit into his sandwich and made a face. “Salami again. Every day for ten years, the same thing. Nothing but salami, mayo and lettuce. Man I’m sick of this.”
It was a trap. Mick had heard it a million times, but Pudd’n took the bait.
“Why don’t you tell your wife to fix you something else?” Pudd’n asked. He was really green.
Danny looked at him like he was crazy. “My wife don’t get up,” he said. “I make my own lunch.”
They hadn’t been there ten minutes when the big crane boom started moving—the same crane they’d been using to hoist I-beams into place. Just beyond the parapet wall the thick steel cable crawled slowly upward, and they could tell by the way it was shaking that it was bringing up something heavy.
Danny cussed, spat, and said, “Don’t that operator have a watch? We’re tryin’ to eat lunch here.”
They were sitting in toward the middle of the building, where the steel structure rose out of the concrete, but an old man in a hard hat stood out by the edge, leaning over the parapet wall and looking down at whatever was coming up on the crane cable.
“What is it?” Mick yelled.
The old guy turned around and shouted back, “A beam. A big one.”
Danny threw his sandwich down and heaved himself to his feet, shaking his head. “I’ll take care of it,” he said, then hollered at the old guy out at the edge, “Flag him up here and I’ll catch the tag line! We’ll rest it on the deck until lunch is over.”
Danny just assumed the old guy at the rail worked there and knew the hand signals. Everybody up top knew how to flag the crane operator, but that old man just gave Danny a look. Until he pulled his “hands” out of his jacket pockets none of them realized it was the homeless guy known as the Man With No Hands. All he had was hooks where his hands should have been. Danny rolled his eyes and trotted over there to flag the load himself. Mick put his lunch down and moved to a clear spot so he could grab the tag line when Danny boomed it over to him, and guide the base of the beam down onto the concrete.
Leaning over the wall, Danny signaled the operator with his thumbs, guiding the beam up over the slab. Those main support beams were monsters. They didn’t look like it from a distance but they were thick as a phone booth and heavier than a pickup truck. Once the base of the beam cleared the parapet wall Danny’s signals changed, the crane boom pivoted, and the beam swung over toward Mick. He caught hold of the twenty-foot rope hanging from the bottom to steady it, to stop the beam from swinging while the crane eased it down onto the concrete near where they’d been sitting. As soon as the base touched down Danny had the operator drop just enough slack in the cable so the top tilted a little, then he dogged it off.
Glaring down at the crane operator, Danny put his fists together and made like he was breaking a twig, then flung his hands up over his head. The message was clear—“Take a break, fool! It’s lunchtime!” Then he stomped back over to his wire reel to finish his lunch.
The Man With No Hands put his hooks back in his jacket pockets and stayed out there at the edge with his back to the ironworkers.
Now, everybody on the job knew about the Man With No Hands, but nobody actually knew him. They knew he was homeless, which meant that he lived at Overpass Plantation, which was the name they had assigned to the cluster of makeshift boxes and tents thrown up under a couple of bridges close to the job. There must have been two hundred homeless people living there at the time, and a kind of uneasy truce existed between them and the construction workers.
The bums from Overpass Plantation cruised the job all the time, and they were almost invisible because the first thing they would do is steal a hard hat. It was simple; put a hard hat on the average homeless man and he looked just like a construction worker. There were always a few bums wandering around on the job looking for tools they could pawn. They considered it their job, and they were good at it. Conscientious. Mick could remember one guy who walked around for a year carrying a length of half-inch pipe on his shoulder. It was a great disguise. The yellow hard hat and that piece of pipe labeled him as an electrician, so nobody paid any attention to him—he just dropped right off the radar screen.
They’d walk around on the job like they were going someplace, and if they saw a portable band saw or a big drill laying around unattended they’d gather it up, wind the cord around it and walk casually away with it on their shoulder, as if it belonged to them. And yet they had a kind of code. They’d steal power tools in a minute, but they never touched a man’s hand tools. Bums wouldn’t ordinarily steal from a workingman. Workingmen had to pay for their hand tools out of their own pockets, but the company bought the power tools, which meant they were deductible. And insured. Besides, if a guy was homeless, jobless, and didn’t mind doing jail time, there wasn’t much a company could do to him even if they caught him. A mad pipefitter could do plenty.
But the Man With No Hands was different. He had a reputation. It was more a matter of rumor than fact, but rumors will sometimes grow into legends when mere facts won’t. First, the Man With No Hands had never been known to steal anything. He never took his hooks out of his pockets if he could help it, most likely because his hooks marked him—as soon as he took his hooks out of his pockets everybody knew who he was, and that he didn’t belong there. But the main thing, the thing that started the whispered rumors, was what had happened to a fitter named Joey Montrose.
Joey was down on his luck. He had just come back to work after a long layoff, his wife had been real sick, and he was about to lose his truck. He was on his way to the lay-down yard one morning, walking past a sump pit covered by a piece of plywood, when he heard a voice calling for help. He moved the plywood and found the Man With No Hands down in the pit. Sometime in the night while nobody was around, the old man had passed through and stepped on the loose plywood, which dumped him into the sump pit and then flipped over, covering the hole. It wasn’t that deep, and he wasn’t hurt, but he couldn’t pull himself out with those hooks. Joey climbed down into the hole and shoved the old man out, then gave him a five and told him to go get some breakfast.
“God will bless you,” the old man said, and several of Joey’s buddies heard him say it. They remembered it later, maybe because of the way he said it. Not “God bless you” but “God will bless you.” Still, they all would have forgotten about it anyway within a day or two, except that on his way home that afternoon Joey bought a lottery ticket that paid him a hundred and twenty-three thousand dollars. From then on the Man With No Hands was a legend. Most of the construction workers had endured enough bosses to know that a man who can bless you can also curse you. Whether they would admit it or not, most of them were afraid of the Man With No Hands. But not Mick—he’d never been the superstitious kind.
Sitting there eating lunch and staring at that old man’s back, Mick kept thinking about the way he pulled his hooks out of his pockets when Danny yelled at him. One of them had snagged on the edge of his pocket, just for a second, and he had to shake it loose so he could hold it up and show Danny. Mick started to feel sorry for him, which was a new thing. He’d always figured a man’s life was a lot like his dog or his computer—it did what he trained it to do. If a guy was living under a bridge, then he must have made all the right moves to get himself there. But when the Man With No Hands shook his hook loose to show Danny who he was, Mick saw a little piece of humiliation flash across his face and it started him wondering what the old man was doing on top of the building, and why he bothered to climb twelve flights of stairs. It finally dawned on him that in the middle of the day that open slab on top of the twelfth floor was the sunniest place in the world—the warmest place to be. It had been a long night and he was wearing a light jacket. The old man was just cold.
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br /> Mick looked at all the surplus in his lunchbox. He called out to the old man, who turned around and looked.
“You want a bowl of soup?” Mick yelled.
He nodded, then headed in Mick’s direction. While he was waiting, Mick opened a Styrofoam cup of soup and poured hot water into it.
“You’ll have to wait a minute for the noodles to soften up,” he said, handing over the cup.
“Thank you.” He pinched the lip of it with his hook and stood there holding it, leaning his face into the steam. He was pretty good with those hooks. They were the double kind, with wires and pulleys so he could grip stuff with them.
Mick handed him a plastic spoon. “You can sit on the gangbox if you want,” he said. The old man was just standing there. He could have sat down on one of the reels with the crew, but it was easy to see why he might not want to. He didn’t have the right. Didn’t belong. He scooted himself onto the top of the gangbox, where nobody else was sitting, and hunched over his soup.
He could have used a shave, but apart from that the old man didn’t seem too bad off. He was maybe fifty-five or sixty. His clothes were about as good as Mick’s, and he didn’t look crazy. Mick had always figured anybody who lived under a bridge had to be a few degrees out of plumb, but this guy didn’t look it. It might have been better if he had come across just a tad wacko because Mick would have known how to deal with that. Half the people he worked with were a tad wacko. But apart from the hooks this guy looked almost normal. He seemed reasonably intelligent and didn’t talk much—a combination that made a lot of people nervous. When the men finally figured out it was okay to ignore him the same way they did each other sometimes, they relaxed a little and forgot about him.
Summer of Light Page 2
