“Nah.” Mick had lost several minor skirmishes and a major battle in the last ten minutes. He was feeling a little cranky, which probably explains why he fired a parting shot before the Man With No Hands got out of hearing. It didn’t come out right. He meant it to be clever, but it just wasn’t. Looking back on it later, after he’d had ample time to rethink it, he was pretty sure that what came out of his mouth next was the single dumbest thing he’d ever said.
“Unless maybe you can find a way to impart some of that childlike wisdom.”
The old man had turned away, heading back out toward the wall at the edge of the building, but he stopped and turned around. He looked back at Mick with that same half-grin, only his eyes narrowed a little and his head tilted. Turning away, he shrugged. Raising a hook in a casual wave, he said something Mick couldn’t hear very well.
It sounded like “Whatever you say.”
Mick stood there watching the Man With No Hands walk across the slab, and there was something wrong about it. Something bad wrong. Mick couldn’t figure out what it was at first, because he was so focused on the Man. The old man had nearly made it to the parapet wall when Mick figured out, all at once, that it was the shadow. The Man With No Hands had walked across fifty feet of concrete, and the zigzag shadow of the crane boom had stayed right on him the whole way. When Mick finally put it together it went through him like an electric shock.
The crane boom was swinging away.
Mick saw the whole thing all at once. He could picture Danny getting mad while he went down twelve flights of stairs, and then biting a chunk off of the crane operator when he got there. He could picture the crane operator chomping his cigar and jamming levers, that big diesel growling and the boom swinging.
The shadow followed the Man With No Hands because the boom was swinging away. In a second it would be followed by the massive steel beam shackled to the end of the cable.
A second after that the beam would be followed by the idiot tethered to the bottom of it with a twenty-foot tag line.
Mick grabbed for the knot, but even before his hands found it he felt the deep groaning of tons of steel twisting on the concrete. And then silence, as that monster beam lifted off and swung gracefully away.
Once, when he was a kid, while waterskiing up at Lake Lanier, Mick’s crazy uncle decided to pull him off from the dock. Mick sat on the edge of the timbers while the boat got about a thirty-foot running start, then the rope went tight and snatched him clean out of his bathing suit.
This was a lot like that, only Mick was tumbling and bouncing across concrete instead of water, which is probably how he sprained his knee. Then he slammed into the parapet wall, which is definitely where he broke his nose and lost his two front teeth. A half-second later the rope caught up again, snatched him like a rag doll over the wall and flung him cartwheeling out into space.
A strange thing happened then, while he was swinging upside down twelve stories in the air. The last thing Mick remembered seeing before he passed out was the Man With No Hands—just a face above the parapet wall, watching. He was smiling. Like he knew something.
3
* * *
To be a man.
WHEN Layne skidded into the hospital room all out of breath Mick knew he was going to have to whitewash the story for her. The truth would have killed her graveyard dead. Layne had never been afraid of anything much, except that she had a perfect horror of heights. And she feared more for other people than she did for herself, like the time they went to Lookout Mountain and her knees buckled whenever one of the kids got near the railing. Snug and safe in a hospital room with the accident behind him, Mick couldn’t see any good reason to give her a mental picture of her husband swinging dishrag limp at the end of a skinny rope twelve floors up. Sometimes a guy just needed to lie to his wife.
He looked like he’d been mugged—black and blue from one end to the other, nose the size and color of a plum, half his face bruised green and gold, a line of ragged stitches through his upper lip, and two front teeth missing. When he told her he fell off a wire reel she cut her eyes around at Danny for a truth check. Standing in the corner, Danny nodded, backing Mick up without so much as a glance, which was good because Layne didn’t miss much. Anyway, it was the truth, technically—he really did fall off a wire reel. Besides that, Danny felt guilty. He was pretty sure he had caused the accident in the first place by going down and hard-cussing the crane operator, who got mad and snatched the beam off the deck, blind, without a flagman. Mick found out later they fired the operator.
Layne pressed him for details, but the fat lip and missing teeth made it hard to talk and he was slurring his S’s pretty badly. She finally gave it up and just stood there holding his hand.
* * *
When he got home the next day the kids jumped him. Toad, the seven-year-old dynamo, flashed out of nowhere like a white-blond rocket and hit him square in the chest, which is why he didn’t see her older brother coming. Ben charged in a step or two behind her and nailed his dad in the groin with his head. Dylan pulled up short. He took one look and refused to come any closer.
“Ith all right, thun,” Mick said.
He was at eye level with Dylan, having dropped to his knees after Ben’s headbutt. Dylan’s brow furrowed, and when he heard a lisping imitation of his dad’s voice coming out of that Frankenstein face he let out a little snarl. Mick waited, giving him space, and in that brief frozen moment he saw something he had not seen before. Deep in his son’s eyes, behind the veil of suspicion and anger, he caught a glimpse of cold fear.
Layne’s evil sister Lisa had come over to watch the kids while Layne brought Mick home from the hospital. Now Dylan sidled up to his aunt’s legs, keeping a wary eye on this man who pretended to be his father.
Lisa lifted him to her chest and brushed the hair back from his dark eyes.
“It’s your daddy,” she crooned, with a triumphant little smirk. “He just looks a little . . . different, that’s all. Maybe even better.” Behind her back Mick generally referred to his sister-in-law as Lisa-Comma-PhD because she wouldn’t even sign a restaurant check without tagging on the PhD. His arch-nemesis was enjoying this a little too much.
“Thank you, Lethal,” he lisped, and as soon as he heard what he had said he knew that his fat lip and missing teeth had rendered something wonderful. “Doctor Lethal,” he corrected himself, unable to keep from smiling despite the searing pain it brought to his lip. He saw the little flaring of her nostrils and made a mental note to keep calling her that.
Despite Doctor Lethal’s urging, Dylan wouldn’t go anywhere near his dad, but Ben and Toad hung on for a while, poking and prodding and asking questions about all the wonderful new injuries. Ben’s wheels were always spinning, comparing what he heard to what he saw, and he wanted graphic details of the accident. Mick stuck to the short version, though it was even harder to sell a lie to Ben than to his mother. Toad just wanted to know if he cried.
* * *
Within a week the swelling was gone, along with all of the bruises except for a little dark yellow spot on one side of his chin. By the second week his knee was almost back to normal and he got a partial plate to replace his front teeth. Dylan, who had finally gotten used to the lisp and the gap in his dad’s smile, backed off again, leery of front teeth that came and went. Dylan had a lisp of his own, and during the time of the missing front teeth he actually came to enjoy the fact that his dad had one too. Before Mick got his new teeth, Dylan would sometimes echo a word Mick lisped, repeating it over and over as if he were practicing sounding like his dad.
After a couple weeks Mick was itching to get back to work, so when Layne started making noises again about him staying home with the kids he dug his heels in.
“You might as well mark it down, hon,” Mick told her. “As long as I’ve got a job and a truck, I ain’t stayin’ home. It’ll never happen.”
“Never is a long time,” she said. At least she didn’t bring God into it.
She made
him nervous, acting like she knew something he didn’t, and Monday couldn’t come fast enough.
On Friday afternoon Mick was out in the garage tinkering with his brake lights when Ben climbed up in the bed of the truck and sprawled on his belly watching him back the screws out and line them up on the tailgate. Ben’s eyes followed the whole process, his chin resting on his palms.
“Whatcha workin’ on?” he asked.
“Brake lights.”
“They busted?”
“No, they work. In fact, they work too much. They stay on all the time.”
“Why do they stay on?”
“Don’t know.”
“Well, what makes them go on and off?”
“The brake pedal,” Mick said, then went ahead and answered the next question. “The one that’s sideways.” He motioned toward the cab with his screwdriver. “They’re supposed to come on when you mash the pedal and go off when you let go.”
“But they don’t?”
“No.”
“Then it’s got to be the pedal.” Ben had a surprising grasp for an eight-year-old. Scary, sometimes.
“Well, I checked that first, but it looked to me like the switch was working okay, so I’m checking the wiring back here to see if maybe there’s a short or something.”
“Tell me about the accident again,” Ben said.
Mick looked up, blinked. Ben had the attention span of a housefly, but he had laser focus. He’d seen Mick with his shirt off right after the accident, and something about it didn’t add up.
“I told you, I fell off a wire reel.” He took out the last screw and removed the taillight assembly. He’d already been over this a half dozen times, but for some reason Ben had sunk his teeth into it and wouldn’t let go. “A big wire reel,” Mick added, for emphasis.
Looking at that skeptical face, a memory flashed across his mind about something that happened in a camera store when Ben was little. Six years ago, but it seemed like only a week. Layne was holding one-year-old Toad, and Ben was cruising the lower shelves out on the floor while Mick talked to the guy at the counter. One of the clerks was watching Ben pretty closely. He was clearly nervous about a toddler handling the merchandise, so he went over to steer him away from the expensive stuff. Ben was only two, and small for his age. Bundled up in his snow jacket he looked barely old enough to walk. That young store clerk picked up a picture frame with a grinning cartoon dinosaur crawling around the edge of it, showed it to Ben and said, “Look, little dude! Do you know what this is?”
The clerk actually squeaked when he talked, the way most people do when they talk to an infant. He obviously didn’t think Ben was old enough to talk, while in fact he was born talking in complex sentences. At two, he already knew how to run the computer and his favorite disc was a dinosaur program with a lot of moving pictures, roaring and sound effects.
Ben, not knowing the clerk mistook him for a child, assumed the man needed an expert opinion, so he took the picture frame in his little hands and studied it for a minute. Mick turned around just in time to hear him say, “I’m not sure. I guess it could be a diplodocus, but a diplodocus doesn’t usually have these bumps on his back.”
The clerk straightened up then, and looked over his shoulder with a kind of shocked half-smile on his face. He thought it was a setup. When Allen Funt didn’t pop out of the shadows he just shook his head and walked away, left Ben standing there holding the picture frame.
That’s how Ben was. When something caught his interest he locked on and learned everything there was to know about it. Things had to make sense. For Ben, his dad falling down and busting his face was fascinating stuff, but he saw something in it that didn’t add up.
“It looked funny,” he said, his head bobbing on his palms. “Like a big X on your back.”
Mick took out the brake-light bulb and held it up. The filament looked okay. “I told you, my safety harness was too tight.”
He was glad the phone rang when it did. He laid the screwdriver on the tailgate and ducked into the house to answer it.
What Mick heard over the phone came as such a shock that it wiped out everything else. Passing through the laundry room on his way back outside he bumped into Layne, folding clothes out of the dryer and dropping them into a basket.
“What’s wrong?” she said, seeing the shock on his face. “Who was on the phone?”
“Bingham. The project manager. Apparently I won’t be going back to work on Monday after all. They’re letting me go.”
She blinked, stopped folding. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Gross negligence, according to the safety report. They’re firing me,” he muttered, almost absently, still trying to get his mind around it.
“Negligence? For falling off of a wire reel?”
“Yeah, well, they’re a little antsy about safety these days. A guy got killed a couple months ago. The safety nerds always go overboard for a while after something like that.”
“I know some good lawyers,” she said, but the twinkle in her eye told him she wasn’t really thinking about helping him get his job back. She was thinking about that other thing.
He shook his head. “No, I don’t want to sue anybody.” He didn’t want to get into a big long discussion with her, mainly because he was pretty sure the truth would come out if he did. She’d seen her share of cross examinations. He was beginning to wish he’d just told her the whole story in the first place.
She started to say something else, but she let it go. There would be time for questions later. She shook out another pair of jeans and let him slip out the door.
Ben was standing by the back of the truck with the screwdriver in his hand. When he heard Mick coming he laid it down real quick and jumped back a half step. Toad came flying up, white hair bouncing, jacket unzipped and flapping in the breeze. She skidded to a stop, grabbed her brother by the arm and spouted, “C’mon, Ben! Hap’s cat’s having kittens!”
Mick nodded, waved his consent. Ben took off, trailing his sister through the woods. When he picked up the screwdriver Mick saw there was nothing left to do because while he was gone his eight-year old son had fitted the tail-light assembly back in place and run all the screws in. Pity—his hands needed something to do right then. He just stood there for a long time tapping the screwdriver on the tailgate, thinking. It wasn’t going to be so easy finding a job. Things had tightened up lately.
* * *
Later, after the kids were all bathed, pajamaed and packed into their beds, Layne looked over her book at him.
“So what are we going to do?” she asked.
He shook his head. “I guess I can ride workman’s comp for another week or two while I make a few calls and see what’s out there. I can tell you now, it doesn’t look good. I’ll probably have to take a pay cut. Even then, it might be a while.”
“We can get by on what I make.” She tossed this grenade very casually, while pretending to look at her book.
“I can scout around and maybe pick up a couple side jobs,” Mick said, ignoring her ominous implication. “Room additions, garages.” This was a real possibility. Like most construction workers, Mick knew more than just his own trade, and he had done remodeling work before in a pinch.
She sighed and kept her eyes on her book, but she was suspiciously calm, which was completely out of character. Women worried. Finally, she came out with it.
“Why can’t you stay home, Mick? You’re already out of work. It just makes sense.”
“I told you, that’s not happening. I’m not cut out to be a housewife. I don’t even want to talk about it.”
She lowered the book to her lap. “Why not? I mean, if it’s about the money, we can tighten our belts a little. Besides, you remember we figured it up? It’s a plain fact that after daycare, gas, lunch and all the expenses incurred by going to work every day, the second income doesn’t amount to much.”
Incurred. She spent entirely too much time with lawyers.
“Yeah, but the second
income is yours,” he said.
“Not anymore. My benefits are way better than yours, even when you’re working, and right now we really need my health plan to cover Dylan.” She was trying to hide the little catlike smile on her face. At least she had the decency not to point out that since the latest raise her check was bigger than his.
The television stayed on all the time whether anybody was watching or not. Neither of them was watching it right then, though they were both staring at it. What Mick was really seeing was the grin of a grizzled old man with stainless-steel hooks for hands, and he was hearing the words “You don’t know what the day will bring.” Alarms clanged in his head. Everything in him rebelled.
“Law’s Miss Scahlet,” Mick whined, doing his best Prissy impression, “I don’t know nothin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies.”
One of her eyebrows dropped, the other went up. “I’ve never seen anything you couldn’t do if you put your mind to it,” she said. “And besides, how many times have you told me a man could do a day’s ration of housework in forty-five minutes?”
Anything you say can and will be used against you. For some reason it made him think of Layne’s father. “In my day,” her father had said—in fact, Mick was pretty sure everything his father-in-law ever said started with those three words—“a man didn’t have to hang around the delivery room and catch the baby. In my day a man went out drinking with his buddies and smoked cigars until somebody come got him. A man never even had to look at a baby till it had a hat on its head.”
That was then. This is now. Mick caught all three of his babies, and changed his share of dirty diapers, too. That incompetent buffoon in the movies with the tongs and the nose plugs didn’t exist in real life. Not anymore. In Mick’s day a man was expected to know how to coach his wife on counting and pushing and breathing and cleaning out a baby’s nose with a suction bulb. His kids were all clear of bottles and diapers now, but he’d gotten his share of it. The care and feeding of children was not a whole new concept for him, and to tell the truth, it hadn’t really been that hard taking care of babies. Babies were a lot like old trucks—they leaked and made noises. Clean up the mess, top off the fluids, and the noises usually stopped.
Summer of Light Page 4
