No Colder Place (4 page)

DiMaio raised his eyes to the sky. “Now I know you’re crazy. You realize they only won to suck in guys like you, set you up for next time?”

“Hey, Mike,” Phillips asked, “how come you never put your money where your mouth is?”

“I don’t have to. I just watch you, it cures me of gambling forever. Smith, you want to raise this mortar up, it’s okay with me.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“Nah, go ahead if you want,” DiMaio said. “If it’ll slow you down …”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Let’s get to work.”

I worked beside Mike DiMaio all morning, trying to keep up, to find my way back into the rhythm of the thing. I watched him, followed his moves as they flowed from one step to the next. It had been a long time since I’d worked as a mason, and I’d never done work this complicated. As I set the bricks forward and back, turned them on their sides or ends to run header courses or soldiers, I fell further and further behind. We were working on our knees, something I hadn’t thought of; before we started DiMaio swung through the opening into the building and came back with a pair of knee pads for me.

“Thanks.”

He shrugged. “Guy they belong to won’t need ’em till tomorrow.”

As we worked, the July sun mounted, and though our side of the building was in shadow and the chill from the inside escaped toward us in small breaths, after an hour my shirt was plastered to my back and a film of sweat covered my arms and neck. DiMaio didn’t say much, just did his work, quick, clean, and efficient, and watched mine. Striking a sharp joint he wouldn’t have to go back over, he nodded his head toward my trowels, my brick level, my hard hat. “All new?”

“I left everything,” I said. “The hell with it. Came north with nothing. Change my luck.”

He grunted as he tapped a brick into place. “Did it work?”

“I got this job.”

We stopped for coffee at break time, nine-thirty, and it wasn’t until then that I met Joe Romeo.

We were working higher by then, laying those hip-high courses that give you a choice of reaching up from your knees or bending as you both standing—DiMaio, because at his height it made stand. We were sense, and me, because my knees were beginning to wonder what the hell I was up to. A small bounce in the scaffolding let us know someone was headed our way.

“That’s Joe,” DiMaio said, snapping mortar off his trowel without looking around. “Always thinks he’s sneaking up on you. Like being snuck up on by an elephant. Act surprised when he gets here, maybe you’ll get points.”

I looked over my shoulder, saw a big man, dark-haired and thick-necked, handsome in the way of football players, or soldiers. I straightened up, stood my trowel in the mortar. I lifted my hard hat and dragged the back of my glove across my forehead to blot up some sweat.

The big man reached us, stopped, looked at me to size me up and let me know he was doing it. My instinct was to do the same, give it back to him, set my place in his life where I wanted it; but that wasn’t why I was here. I was the first to look away, out over the scaffold, where the buildings were watching our progress.

After a few moments Joe Romeo looked away too, down at the clipboard he carried. He peered at the brickwork Mike DiMaio and I had laid so far, then came back to me.

“You’re Smith.”

“Right,” I said.

“From Houston?”

“Right.”

“I’m Joe Romeo. Foreman. Lozano told you?”

I nodded.

“Just don’t fuck with me, you’ll be okay.” He looked past me, to DiMaio. “Whaddaya say, Mikey? He any good?”

DiMaio shrugged. “Good as Nicky.”

“Nicky? Nicky’s a putz. Give us something better than that, you don’t mind, Smith. Bring up the quality from this team.”

“Fuck you, Joe,” DiMaio said without a smile.

“Fuck you too, Mikey. That’s my job, keeping up the quality around here. You got a problem with that, maybe you got a problem with quality. What the hell’s that?” he suddenly said, pointing to my right forearm, to the snake-shaped scar there.

“Old mistake,” I said.

“You make a lot of mistakes?”

“I try not to.”

“Try harder. I wanna keep up the schedule here, keep Crowell and that asshole architect off our tail. Any team falls behind, that’s a problem, you understand?”

“I understand.”

“Good. You find the can, water cooler, all that shit?”

“Mike showed me.”

“Mikey showed you.” Romeo smiled at DiMaio, a slow, even smile. “Greatest partner a man could have, Mikey. Okay, just don’t spend the whole day in the can, you got that, Smith?”

DiMaio said, “That thing don’t get serviced more often, nobody’s gonna be spending any time in it. Guys’ll be pissing off the scaffold.”

“Not my problem, Mikey.”

“You’re the foreman.”

“And you know what that means?” Romeo said with mock delight. “It means I get to piss in the trailer! You got a problem with the facilities, Mikey, talk to Crowell. Little Dan Junior oughta be around this afternoon.”

DiMaio’s face didn’t lose its belligerence but he didn’t answer.

“All right, you two,” Romeo said, smiling as he looked at his clipboard, as though he’d won something. “Kenny’s going for coffee. You want something, tell him, then get back to work. I want you at waist before you rest your butts.”

He made a note on the clipboard, let his eyes move over me once more, then walked on, heading toward Buck and Lucca. I looked at DiMaio. It would take us another hour to get to the brick course at waist height, even DiMaio’s waist.

“That’s bullshit,” DiMaio said. “He knows it when he says it. He knows we’re gonna stop as soon as Kenny gets back.”

“Then why does he bother?”

“So he told us to do something we didn’t do. Gives him something to chew our asses about, later.” As DiMaio reached for a brick I heard him give a snort. “Quality,” he muttered. “Shit.”

When the coffee came, brought around by a grinning Jamaican laborer whose hard hat sat high on his dreadlocks, DiMaio and I stripped off our gloves and dropped to the scaffold, resting our backs against the brick.

My throat felt coated with the same fine dust that dulled the sweat on my arms. I sipped my coffee, trying to wash the dryness away. Mike DiMaio bit into an apple turnover, said to me, “You’re slow.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m rusty.”

“Year’s layoff?”

“Yeah.”

“How much did you work before that?”

“Spotty. Only on and off since maybe ’ninety-three.”

“ ’Ninety-three, huh?” He swallowed some coffee. Looking out over Broadway, toward the river, he said, “That thing on your arm don’t look like a mistake to me.”

“No?” I said, watching him.

“No. Looks like a fucking snake, one of them hooded ones. Looks like it was supposed to be just like that.”

“It was,” I answered. “The mistake was mine.”

DiMaio was about to say something else, but sudden shouts from inside the building brought us both to our feet.

Someone’s always shouting on a building site. It’s usually the only way to be heard over the construction noise; you get used to it, and you block it out.

But there’s another kind of shout, the kind that means trouble, that carries fear or pain or a boiling anger. You hear that differently, and when it happens, you jump.

Inside, framed in the square of the window opening, we saw men running, heading for the piles of brick and block around the small concrete mixer. Next to the mixer, someone crouched beside a dark figure motionless on the floor.

DiMaio was up the scaffold steel and through the opening while I was still taking in the scene. I swung through and followed. Someone inside called out, was answered by another call. Running footsteps slapped the concrete. At the mixer, I had to elbow through standing men to reach what I found: Reg Phillips, lying still, his blood soaking into the pile of sand he made his mortar from.

Still, but alive. His face was a glistening mess, covered with the blood pooling out of a deep gash in his scalp; but blood doesn’t flow that fast if it’s not being pushed by a heart that’s still beating.

Two men, Mike DiMaio and a man I didn’t know, were crouching next to Phillips, and others were standing, leaning in, but no one was moving. Everyone seemed frozen with the idea that it was too late to do anything, too late for anything to matter. I pushed away the man I didn’t know, knelt, threw my hard hat aside. I tore off my T-shirt and pressed it to the wound. “Move! Give me some room!” I barked at the men surrounding us. Some did. “Find a blanket,” I said to DiMaio. “Something to keep him warm. This much blood, he’ll go into shock.” DiMaio stared at me for a second; then he jumped up, pushed his way through. “Someone call 911,” I yelled, looking at Phillips, not the men around me.

“I called,” someone answered. “I called already.”

“Don’t bother,” drawled a voice behind me, one of the men I had elbowed away. “He’s gone.”

“Like hell,” I snapped. “What the hell happened?”

No answer from anyone; then, the same voice as before. “Must’ve tripped over his own fucking shovel, smashed his head against that pile of bricks.”

That was Sam Buck’s voice; now that I had time to think, I knew it. I looked up, saw Sam Buck and Joe Romeo among the crowd of men.

It’s a stupid mistake, and an old one, to trip over your own tools. My eyes searched the sandy concrete floor. Phillips’s shovel was lying nearby, not standing up against something the way it should have been. Anyone could have tripped over it. A corner brick on an open pallet showed dark traces, maybe blood. Phillips’s hard hat lay where it had rolled, down by his leather boot, against a pile of block.

Someone shoved through the forest of Levi-covered legs next to me; DiMaio, with a quilted gray fire blanket, the kind you toss over the flames to smother the whole thing. Heavy as lead, but we wrapped Phillips in it, never letting up on the pressure of my shirt on his skull. He groaned once as we moved him, a good sign.

“All right, you assholes,” Joe Romeo called loudly, “move back. He ain’t dead, so give him room to breathe.”

Nothing happened. Another voice gave the order again: “All you men, move back!”

This voice didn’t carry as well as Romeo’s, but it was obeyed. The men moved back, but not far, the way a crowd will move. Someone came with a first-aid kit, and DiMaio rummaged through it for some gauze, which we folded thickly and pressed to Phillips’s skull, throwing my shirt aside. I felt heavy with the weight of the stands of brick and block, the piles of sand and the crowd of men pressing in on this spot, and I wanted room, but I stayed where I was, kept the pressure steady, waited for the paramedics to arrive. They came soon, with something better than my shirt to bandage the wound, and something better than a fire blanket to cover Phillips, as they filled his arm with saline and rolled him away on a stretcher.

After that the men milled around for a while, looking at each other, drinking coffee that had gone cold.

“Dangerous fucking job, construction,” I heard one of them say. “Can’t let yourself get sloppy. You got to take it into account.”

“I never known Reg to be sloppy before,” another said.

“Always a first time.”

They all agreed with that, that there was always a first time.

Some of them slapped me on the back, told me it was a good thing I thought fast; some of them didn’t, and I knew they were the ones who hadn’t thought fast themselves.

“Hey, hero.” It was Joe Romeo, and he was talking to me. I was sitting on the concrete, my back against the raw steel of a column, away from the others. I’d just lit a cigarette. I looked up at him and waited.

“So, what, you were a fucking doctor before you decided to mix with the common man and lay bricks?”

I shrugged. “He was bleeding. I thought it might be a good idea to stop the blood.”

“This kind of thing happen a lot in Texas?”

“Dangerous job, construction,” I said.

“Christ!” he said suddenly, staring at my left arm. “You got a thing for snakes, or what?”

I glanced at the blue snake tattoo that winds from my elbow to my shoulder, a mark I’ve had for twenty-five years.

“No,” I said. “Coincidence.”

“Oh,
coincidence
.” He emphasized the word sarcastically, nodded. “You know, Smith, I’m starting to not like you, and I don’t even know you. So now what? You gonna go back to work today, or I’m gonna have to give you time off for being a hero?”

I looked at him, his broad shoulders and sardonic grin. “I’ll work,” I said. “Let me finish my smoke, and clean up.” I was sticky with Phillips’s blood.

“Finish it fast, then. Your partner’s back on the job already.”

I looked across the floor to the bay where Mike DiMaio and I had been working that morning. DiMaio was on the scaffold, working on the complex brick pattern around one of the columns. His movements were sharp and hard, not smooth the way they’d been before. He had no flow, no rhythm, but the results were clean, and nothing he did, while I watched, had to be done over.

I stuck the cigarette in my mouth and went to rinse off in the icy stream from the hose near the mixer. Someone had picked up Phillips’s shovel, taken it somewhere; someone else had moved his hard hat, rested it on his lunchbox next to his leather gloves. I picked up the hard hat, turned it over in my hands, looked at the plastic straps inside. There was nothing strange about it; it was just like mine.

“Smith!” It was Romeo again. I put the hard hat down, picked up the hose, ran water over my arms. I shivered with the suddenness of it as I splashed my face and the back of my neck. Romeo said, “What are you gonna do for clothes?”

“I can work like this,” I said. Shirtless wasn’t such a bad way to be, in this heat. “Until the sun comes around. I’ll pick up a shirt at lunch.” The one I’d come in, the one I’d bandaged Phillips with, lay in a puddle of water and blood and sand beside the mixer.

“Yeah,” he said, “okay.” I had the feeling there was something else he wanted to say to me, but he didn’t try.

I walked back across the floor to where I’d worked all morning. I didn’t go through right away. DiMaio turned when he saw me, straightened and stood, a brick in one hand, trowel in the other. He watched me. His jaw was tight and his pale eyes hard. He moved aside. I sat on the backup block and swung my legs through to the other side.