“It ain’t fair,” Danny said, unwrapping another salami sandwich.
“You still fussing about the girl?” Mick asked. Danny had been snippy all morning because the company hired a girl and put her in his crew. At the moment she was down at the roach coach.
“She can’t carry her own weight,” Danny said, tearing into the sandwich. “She just ain’t big enough. Worse than that, she ain’t half bad looking, so the single guys are already competing with each other, trying to do her job for her. She bats her eyes and they take up her slack.”
“I hate when that happens,” Spence the electrician said. “Couple months ago I had to run a rack of four-inch pipe across the ceiling of the mechanical room and they sent a girl to help me.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. I put a stick of four-inch on the floor at the foot of the ladders and did nothing. After a while the foreman came around yelling at us to get after it, so I picked up my end and waited. You should have seen it. I mean, a ten-foot piece of four-inch weighs a hundred and ten pounds, right? It was a scream—him standing there watching, and she couldn’t even pick up her end of the pipe, let alone go up the ladder with it.”
“Did he tramp her out?”
“Nah, they just moved her to the trim crew, putting on switches and receptacles so she wouldn’t have to do any heavy lifting. They couldn’t fire her.”
“Right,” Danny sneered.
“What’s wrong with letting her put on switches and receptacles?” Pudd’n asked. “Somebody’s gotta do it.”
“Yeah, somebody does,” Mick told him, “but when you give the light work to a girl, some old guy gets laid off because he can’t handle four-inch pipe anymore. Some guy that’s been doing his share of heavy lifting for thirty years, and now he’s got a bad back, blown knees or a skippy heart, but he still needs to feed his family. He’s paid his dues, but he gets laid off anyway because the light duty goes to some twenty-year-old girl.”
“Right,” Danny said, without the sarcasm. They thought a lot alike, Danny and Mick.
“I’ve never seen a woman who could carry her own weight on the job,” Mick said.
Maybe it was his imagination, but he could have sworn the Man With No Hands kind of paused when he said that. He was bringing the cup of ramen noodles up to his face, one hook holding the lip and the other supporting the bottom. When he heard what Mick said he froze, just for a second, and the corners of his eyes smiled.
Then he looked straight at Mick with that little twinkle in his eye and asked, “Does your wife work?”
“Yeah, but that’s different. She’s got an office job.” This made Mick a little nervous. He hadn’t mentioned a wife, and like a lot of ironworkers Mick didn’t wear any rings because they tended to get smashed or ripped off, taking fingers with them.
The Man With No Hands nodded and went back to eating, but he kept that grin on his face and it grated on Mick. After the first couple thousand times he got tired of people assuming he was an idiot just because he wore a hard hat, and there was something not quite right about getting a lesson in political correctness from a guy who lived under a bridge.
There was tension in the air for a minute or two, but then Spence the electrician got things back to normal when he started chirping about the Democrats, about who they might put up for a candidate next time around. There was nothing Mick liked better than a good political argument during lunch. He didn’t particularly care which side he took, either, and Spence was just too easy. Mick couldn’t resist launching into a Neal Boortz diatribe about how nobody with any self-respect would ever vote for a bunch of unprincipled socialists.
Danny was used to it. He enjoyed Mick’s rants as much as Mick did, so he stirred the pot a little. “Aw, come on, Mick. We all know a workingman voting for a Republican is like a chicken voting for Colonel Sanders,” he said.
It was an old standard. He might as well have put it on a tee.
Mick rolled his eyes. “Oh, please. You really think you need the government to lay out your clothes in the morning and tell you when you can go to the bathroom?”
“No,” Spence the electrician said, “but I don’t need the company to do it, neither. I just want a little security, that’s all.” He was almost whining. This was going to be fun.
Mick snorted. “You make your own security, Spence. A man’s only security is in his own two hands.”
He had forgotten about his guest, sitting there listening, but when Mick said that the Man With No Hands sort of smiled and looked down at his hooks. He turned them over and examined both sides of them very slowly, and Mick felt his ears turning red. A hard silence fell over the crew and they tried not to stare.
He finally looked up—not at Mick, but off into space.
“If that’s true, that a man’s security is in his own hands, then all is lost,” he said. “All that remains is despair.”
Mick couldn’t make sense of it, and he was pretty sure the others couldn’t, either. They didn’t know this man, and they were already a little uneasy around him. When he dropped a nugget like that it sent everybody’s wackometer spinning into the red zone. If he had been one of the crew somebody would have come back with a smart remark and they’d have moved on, but the Man With No Hands was strange to them, so they just sat there until Mick couldn’t take it anymore.
“Look, I didn’t mean—”
The old man waved a hook, shook his head.
“I was speaking figuratively,” Mick said. “All I meant was, a man’s got to control his own circumstances, that’s all. A man has got to pull up his bootlaces and get to work. He can’t wait for somebody to take care of him, he’s got to control his own destiny, decide his own future. A man’s got to be the captain of his own ship.”
The Man With No Hands laughed then, just a little chuckle.
“The mind of a man plans his way, but the Lord directs his steps,” he said. “You don’t know what the day will bring.”
Somehow, the argument had gone from politics to religion. Dangerous territory. And there was something in that little laugh of his that Mick didn’t like. It made him nervous, the way he had said “the day,” but it was the way he laughed when he said it that made Mick mad. He was fine with an argument, but condescension was another thing altogether. Danny and Pudd’n and Spence the electrician were looking at Mick, waiting to see what he would say. There were rules, boundaries. Religion was one of the few things they never argued about at lunch, but the old man had started it, and Mick wasn’t about to back down now.
“Whatever the day brings,” Mick told him, “I’ll handle it. I always have. If God,” he said, putting maybe a little too much weight on the word, “has ever planned my day, he sure didn’t tell me about it.”
“Maybe you never asked.”
They all looked at Mick, waiting.
“Maybe I never needed to. If there is a God, I figure he’s probably too busy running the universe to be my secretary. If there is a God, I’ve never heard the first peep out of him.”
It didn’t come out right, as usual, and Mick ended up sounding like some kind of heathen, which he wasn’t. He was born and raised in the South and grew up going to church like everybody else, but he had figured out a long time ago that most of what went on there was a dog and pony show. He knew plenty of Jesus Commandos, and mostly he tried to stay away from them. He didn’t hate them or anything, he just found them tiresome. Mick believed in God, sort of. At least he didn’t not believe.
He held the old man’s stare because everybody was watching him, but the Man With No Hands didn’t answer that last volley. He just went back to eating his soup. If what had just happened was a skirmish then Mick figured he won it, but he wasn’t sure if what he felt next was triumph or pity. It was kind of delicate, the way the old man held that plastic spoon in his hook. Watching him eat, Mick was pretty sure Pudd’n couldn’t have done any better with both hands.
After a while the Man With No Hands said, out of th
e blue, “That’s the wrong beam.” He didn’t even look up from his soup when he said it.
Danny stopped chewing and frowned at him for a second, then tilted his head back and looked up at the I-beam. The bottom of it rested on the concrete a few yards to his left, and the top of it leaned against the taut crane cable like the Tower of Pisa. When he turned back around, Danny had a really funny look on his face.
“How’d you figure that out?” he asked.
The Man With No Hands shrugged, blowing on his spoon. “It’s shorter,” he said.
Mick hadn’t even noticed it himself. It was downright bizarre for an outsider to spot something like that.
“You mean he’s right?” Pudd’n asked.
Danny nodded. “Yeah. This one goes up on the next level. It’s a few feet shorter than the ones we’re using now. I didn’t catch it, and I do this for a living.” He frowned at the old man. “How’d you spot it?”
“I saw them pick it up from the yard,” the Man With No Hands answered. “They got it out of a different pile. Looking at the piles from up here it’s easy to see the difference.”
“I’ll go down and straighten it out,” Mick said. “Soon as I’m done eating.”
Danny wolfed down what was left of his sandwich and stood up. “Nah, I’ll go. I’m already done, and I want to tear a chunk off of that operator anyway.” He walked off dusting his hands, his cheeks puffed out with the last of his sandwich.
Mick felt a little awkward, sitting there alone with Pudd’n, Spence the electrician, and the Man With No Hands. Nobody talked, and the silence was strained. Mick already knew there was no point in trying to carry on a conversation with Pudd’n about anything outside of dirt bikes or girls, and Spence the electrician was still sulking over his politics. When the Man With No Hands finished his soup he put the empty Styrofoam cup down and stared off into space.
“Obliged for the soup,” he said after a while. He still wasn’t looking at Mick. “What I owe you?”
“Nothing.” Mick was pretty sure the old guy didn’t have any money anyway; he was just being polite. He shifted his weight, leaning back on his palms. The quiet tension drove him nuts, so Mick made a move to patch things up.
“Name’s Mick,” he said, but didn’t offer to shake hands. It would have been awkward, with the hooks and all.
The Man With No Hands crossed his legs and linked his hooks around his knee. “Most people just call me Preacher,” he said, staring off across the city skyline.
“So. You a preacher?” No way a real preacher lived at Overpass Plantation.
The old man shrugged, didn’t say anything.
“I just wondered if you were a real preacher or if it’s just a nickname,” Mick said. That didn’t come out right, either, so Mick tried to explain. “You know, because in the trades, when we call a guy ‘Preacher’ it usually means he’s some kind of religious fanatic, a guy that likes to beat you over the head with his Bible.” He gave it up, figuring he better stop apologizing before a fight broke out.
“Nickname, I guess. It’s just a word,” the old man finally answered.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Mick said. “Some of those guys just rub me the wrong way, that’s all. If they can get away with it they’ll spend all day pestering somebody with their religion—on the clock, while the company’s paying them to work. I guess they missed the part about Thou shalt not steal. Anyway, most of the ‘Preachers’ I’ve known on the job were know-it-alls and judgmental prigs.”
The Man With No Hands laughed out loud then, and looked him right in the eye. “Yes. I’ll try to remember not to be judgmental.”
Spence the electrician cackled, slapped his knee, pointed.
Mick sucked a tooth, raised an eyebrow. The old man was starting to get on his nerves again.
The zigzag shadow of the crane boom laid right across the Man With No Hands. When the shadow moved a foot or two the big beam twisted a little and the heavy steel base ground against the concrete making a deep groaning noise Mick could feel in the seat of his pants. Pudd’n had finished his lunch and was leaning on his elbows with his head thrown back taking the sun. He glanced around to see where the noise came from, then rapped against Mick’s leg with his fist and pointed with his eyes over to the ladder from the level below. A white hat was coming up the ladder.
“Squint,” Pudd’n said.
The guy they called Squint was the worst of the safety police, a chinless little twerp with no sense of humor and a deep conviction that his engineering degree made him somehow better than men who worked for a living. Everybody called him Squint because he blinked and squinted all the time like his glasses hurt his eyes. He was standing there in that expensive sheepskin coat he always wore, looking around for somebody to bust.
The ironworkers picked up their hard hats and put them on, very casually. The Man With No Hands didn’t have to because he hadn’t taken his off, but he eased his hooks into his pockets.
Squint’s shiny white hard hat rotated, scanning the slab. There was a cluster of carpenters and some laborers down on the other end, but Mick and his crew were closer, so eventually Squint’s radar locked on and he headed toward them. He stopped next to Spence the electrician and just stood there with his arms crossed, looking up at the I-beam standing on the deck beside them.
“Whose beam is that?” he asked. He was looking at Spence, ignoring Mick.
“Belongs to the ironworkers,” Spence said. “I ain’t touchin’ it.”
Squint and Mick knew each other. They’d had words before. Mick figured he had to be making some kind of subtle point by ignoring him. Squint knew who the beam belonged to.
“No offense, Squint, but I can probably handle things up here,” Mick said.
Squint stared directly at him for the first time. His jaw flexed, and Mick knew he’d scored a direct hit. Nobody called him Squint to his face.
“There’s supposed to be somebody manning that tag line,” he said.
“What tag line?” Mick smiled sweetly, a sign of intense hatred.
“The tag line attached to the bottom of that beam. That rope right there. Anytime a suspended load is within reach of the ground and/or a working surface, a workman will be assigned as necessary to control the load by means of a proper tag line. At all times.”
Squint took a little spiral notebook out of his sheepskin coat, propped it on his knee and started to write something. The price of attitude was about to go up.
“Danny’s gone down to talk to the crane operator,” Mick said. “I’ll get him to hold that rope for you as soon as he gets back.”
Squint’s glasses looked up and he squinted, wrinkling his lip. “And if there’s an accident in the meantime, who’s going to take responsibility for it?”
It was the latest buzzword. The brass had just had a job-wide safety meeting where they brought in some expert in a suit who made a pretty speech, made everybody play some silly little game to illustrate his point, and left them with a new slogan—“Safety Is Everybody’s Responsibility.” Word around the job was, they paid him ten thousand dollars for it.
“All right, I’ll take care of it, but I’d kinda like to finish my lunch.” Mick was already finished eating, but his box was still open and he was still off the clock, so it was a perfectly acceptable lie.
Squint’s eyebrows peaked and he said, “Would you like to finish the day?”
The squint-eyed little twerp was pulling rank, and there was nothing Mick could do about it. It seemed really silly because the beam clearly wasn’t going anywhere, but where safety was concerned Squint was judge, jury and executioner. Mick knew better than to argue with the officious little geek, so he shoved himself to his feet, went over and snatched up the tag line, looped it through the D-ring on his safety belt and jerked a good tight bow-line knot in it. Then he sat back down on the wire reel, crossed his arms and glared.
“Happy now?”
Squint scribbled something else, then put away his notebook and w
alked off shaking his head.
After he was gone Spence the electrician said, “Man, you and him don’t get along too good, do you?”
Mick shook his head. “Knew he was trouble the first time I laid eyes on him. I mean, look at him.” Squint was heading for the little group of carpenters on the other end of the slab. “He’s got a crease in his jeans. Mark it down, Spence—as long as you live, never trust a man who makes his wife iron his work jeans.”
The Man With No Hands had been very quiet while Squint was there, but now he looked up, puzzled. “Why?”
“Because he takes himself way too serious, is why. That’s just plain arrogant.”
The old man touched a hook to the brim of his hard hat, pushing it back on his head. That little grin was on his face again. “Well. Sounds like you’ve got it all figured out.”
Now he was really getting on Mick’s nerves.
“I been down a few dirt roads,” Mick said. “Probably not as many as you, though, Preacher.”
The Man With No Hands dropped his head down, smiling at his lap like he was remembering something. “Well,” he said, “it doesn’t matter how many roads you go down, you won’t find wisdom there anyway. It’s always at the beginning. Wisdom is in the heart of a child.”
“Ooooo-kay,” Mick said. He might have even rolled his eyes a little. His wackometer tipped over into the red and he made a mental note to stay away from the Man With No Hands. His watch said lunchtime was over, and for once he was glad. When Mick got up, the Man With No Hands stood up, too.
“Thanks again for the soup,” he said. “You sure I can’t give you anything for it?”
Summer of Light Page 3
