The Walking People (2 page)

With ten minutes to go, he was at the shift check-in board, flipping the tag under his name so it was red side out. He looked over at the midnight shift board; no red tags meant that they were all up top. All up top meant there hadn't been any problems. There were three others from Michael's shift already in the steel cage, including Ned Powers, a sandhog for twenty-nine years and Michael's closest friend. They waited for him. "Losing your step, Ward?" Asante, one of the power guys, asked. "It's your last day so you figure what the hell, they can fire me?"

"Greta was up. Wanted me to take my vitamins. Am I late?"

"Ward, wait just a second," Powers said as he stepped out of the cage to stop Michael from stepping in, and to the engineer who operated the lift he said, "Hold it a minute." He clapped a broad hand on Michael's back and steered him toward the hoghouse.

"What's happening?" Michael asked. It could be now—a party when he least expected it.

Ned pointed down at Michael's feet and then said loudly, so the others could hear, "I know you said you don't plan to do a lick of work today, Ward, but I don't see why you have to ruin good shoes just to stick it to us."

Michael looked down and blinked. There were his double-socked feet shoved into his new loafers. One step into the tunnel and he'd be ankle-deep in muck. The two waiting in the cage laughed as Ned said gently, so only Michael could hear, "Go on, now, Michael. Get your boots. Put those shoes in your locker. Will I go with you? No, you're grand. All the commotion of last day, isn't it? Makes a person lose his head."

Michael hurried back to his locker and, not wanting to fiddle with the lock again, grabbed a spare pair of boots from storage and left his loafers on a bench. When he finally got back to the cage and the engineer latched the door, the steel platform swayed above the hole for a moment and then with a loud groan began to descend.

The men looked down through the darkness at the murky light more than six hundred feet below. It was a woman's department, Michael decided, goodbyes and gag gifts and that kind of thing. It made sense for nine-to-fivers, office workers, where there were rooms you could have a little party in and desks you could decorate. But in the tunnel? Maybe he'd been watching too much television lately. It was just that one of the Jamaicans had retired in February, twenty-five years in the tunnels, and they'd made a to-do out of it, passing around a card everyone had to sign, chipping in for a gift certificate to a restaurant uptown.

The cage picked up speed. "One hundred," Powers shouted. Michael heard Powers say something, saw his lips move, but wouldn't have known what was said if he hadn't taken the same ride five, sometimes six, days a week for almost four decades. Despite the damage to his ears, he could usually tell if someone was shouting at him over the roar of the machinery. Human voices were weak compared with so many other sounds, but often, when someone yelled over the machines,
there was something in the pitch, some quality added to the noise that did not quite fit, and that made him look up. Other men had made the same discovery, and no one could explain it. Down below, when the machines were off, the men's shouts ricocheted inside the tunnel, hitting the dead end and bouncing right back like a rubber ball thrown hard against a wall. When the machines were on—the shaker, the mole, the muck train, the conveyer belts, the pumps, the fans—they filled the tunnel with sound in a way that felt almost physical, and was physical, actually, when the ground began to tremble.

"Two hundred," Powers called after another thirty seconds. What little daylight had begun to creep in at street level disappeared entirely. At four hundred feet the dim light at the bottom of the hole became brighter, though it remained hazy, as if Michael were looking at it through the oily gauze left on his car windshield after a rainy commute, truck after truck kicking up grit and greasy puddles from the road. At five hundred fifty they were nearly there. At six hundred twenty-five feet the cage came to a stop. As always, the journey had taken just over three minutes. The exposed bedrock wept constantly, big, wet tears that fell in heavy drops or streamed down the rock face in rivers. The air was dense with moisture and dust. The thermometer read fifty-five degrees. The men stepped out of the cage and walked the last twenty feet down the wet aluminum staircase, single file, each making sure to hold tight to the railing.

The week before, Michael heard the walking boss yelling at one of the new guys that only a fucking moron would walk across the bottom of the shaft—hard hat or no hard hat. It took years for the new guys to be as careful as they had to be, and it usually took a tragedy to make them cautious. Once, in 1988, a man on Michael's shift was passing across the bottom of the shaft with his hard hat tucked under his arm when a socket wrench fell from six hundred feet above and cracked his skull as neatly as if someone had gotten him from behind with a cleaver. Every year on the job brought a new tragedy. And then, only a few months ago, there were the stories out of West Virginia, newspapers left open in the breakroom, articles tacked up to the board, novenas said before each shift for nine consecutive shifts, men who hadn't set foot inside a church since they were children, who'd never
been south of New Jersey, bowing their heads, clasping their hands, asking God to save the coal miners, to protect them and their families, just as they felt sure those men in West Virginia would ask God to protect New York's sandhogs if the tables were turned.

The men left their plastic lunch bags and mini-coolers on the damp and mold-freckled picnic table that had been lowered into the hole six years before. They boarded the mining train—a single car, no doors, no roof, like a ride you might see in the littlest kids' part of an amusement park—that would take them to the dead end two miles away. As Michael took his seat, he reminded himself that it was his last trip to the end of the tunnel. It didn't feel like his last time; it felt like every other time, no better, no worse. As the train began to move, he saw that someone had used the chalk meant to mark drilling points to draw a huge yellow sun on a dry section of the rock face. Drawing on the rock was common, and if you picked a good spot it might last for days before being erased by the constant dripping and the wet air. Farther down the tunnel were more drawings: a shamrock, the flag of the Dominican Republic, a series of stick figures. Strung along the mesh wire that covered the sides of the tunnel was the occasional lightbulb. As one bulb flickered and then went out, Michael thought about his first day, and how he thought he'd last just a few weeks. The job was in the Bronx then, in Woodlawn. It was good money, he and Greta kept reminding each other at the time, but the money meant far less when he went down the shaft for the first time and realized he'd have to arrive in the dark, work in the dark, eat in the dark, finish his day in the dark, drive home in the dark. And when he arrived home he was too tired for supper, too tired to talk, too tired to touch Greta for weeks at a time or even to sense her body curled up against him all night long until the alarm went off again and he discovered her behind him, the small spoon holding the big.

Throughout his shift, Michael kept searching for some part of his day to feel different, kept waiting for a feeling to come over him as it had some others who were surprised to find themselves torn about leaving. As always, the mud below sucked him deeper while the mud above kept dripping until it ran down the sides of his hard hat, down his cheeks, his neck, under the collar of his shirt. What was there to
miss? Not the muck, these men insisted, not the work, but the strange life lived so many stories under the sidewalk, too deep and dark even for the city's rats. For a lot of men, it didn't hit them until the very end that the job they'd done for so long was actually important. They were the men who were building the new water tunnel—number 3. Tunnels 1 and 2—dilapidated, vulnerable—were built more than a century earlier and could fail at any moment. They were already leaking, crumbling, propped up and patched so crudely that Michael couldn't see how a disaster had not already happened. Failure of the first two tunnels before number 3 was complete meant that there would be no water for eight million New Yorkers. No water to drink, to bathe, to boil for tea, to put out fires, nothing. "Any moment" was the phrase that had been used for decades to describe the impending disaster. These men were so busy scrubbing behind their ears, cleaning their fingernails, washing the filth off their skin so as not to be embarrassed when they reentered the world at sidewalk level that they never took the time to stop and think: this project is crucial to this city's survival, and I am a part of it. Michael wasn't one of these men. He'd known all along how critical the new water tunnel was and how that need was, in a way, the city's biggest secret.

By the time Michael took the train back to the picnic table and ate his lunch, listened to the usual arguments about whether it was better to work fast or work slow, about which shift did the least work, about how many of them probably had silicosis, about whether or not there would be a strike, he decided he just wasn't the sort of person who got affected by things like leaving. After lunch, he and Powers had to weld five large pieces of rustproof sheeting together. It was a difficult task because of the position of the sheets—mostly overhead—and because the seams had to be absolutely perfect or they would leak. As they worked the blowtorches back and forth across the edges of the metal squares, applying constant temperature and speed, the sparks rained down around them like fireflies flaring, disappearing, flecks of light erupting in an arc over Michael's head, over Powers's head, and landing somewhere behind them. Taken together in the otherwise dark tunnel, the storm of light and the blue glow of the torches' flames seemed like a celebration.

It didn't hit him that he wouldn't be back, didn't honestly become a circumstance he felt for certain, until the very end of his shift when he took his turn on the buster. The muck train went out with the bulk of the rocks, but the men had to use the buster to break the bigger rocks into smaller pieces before loading them onto the conveyer belt that would bring them up to street level. Michael sighed as he approached the buster, bigger than the jackhammers used at street level. He braced himself for the noise, as loud as dynamite explosions even through his earplugs and his one buzzing ear, and he was surprised all over again at just how loud it could get. And then there was the actual shaking, the lights trembling against the tunnel wall, his joints, his neck, the disks of his spine, his brain vibrating inside his skull. Fuck this, Michael thought. I should get them the cake, not the other way around. I should get the lady in the store to write on it
FOR THE GUYS WHO HAVE TWENTY YEARS TO GO
.

At 3:00
P.M.
, as the rest of the men made their way to street level and a hot shower, the walking boss kept Michael back. "It'll be impossible to replace you," the boss said, and shook Michael's hand until Michael felt he could be back on the buster. Behind him, he could hear the cage begin the ascent to the street, and he knew it would be at least fifteen minutes before it returned. By the time he finally got to the hoghouse, rinsed off his slicker and boots, rolled up his muddied clothes, put them in a black plastic bag, retrieved his loafers from the storage room and took a shower, only Powers was around. Michael tried not to be disappointed, but he couldn't help but think they'd all left unusually fast.

"Will we go for a pint?" Powers asked. Powers was two years younger than Michael, and was the only person, aside from Greta, Michael had known since he first came to New York. They never went for pints after work. They were tired. They were hungry. Greta expected Michael home. He and Powers saw each other often enough outside of work. Powers, who was from Mayo, was first drawn to Michael because he heard he was from Galway. When they first met, Powers had asked Michael what town he was from, what village. He knew every village in Connaught, he claimed, or at least the ones worth mentioning.

"We moved a lot," Michael had explained. "But I liked Greta's place. If I could pick a place to be from, I'd pick there."

"Moved a lot," Powers had repeated, drawing his eyebrows together. The year was 1963, they were both working as furniture movers, and Michael had not yet considered how he'd answer the question from other Irish. Ned looked at his new acquaintance for so long that Michael scolded himself for not taking Greta's advice, for not just making up a place and sticking to it. And then Powers had nodded, a single, conclusive dip of the head and thrust of the chin, putting an end to some dialogue he was having inside his own head. "
An Lucht siüil?
" Powers had asked.

The walking people. Travellers. Wanderers. Tinkers. Thieves.
An Lucht siüil
was a country person's way of putting it. They were all walking people now, Michael had considered pointing out. They were all travellers. Instead, he crossed his arms and waited for whatever Ned would say next.

"I understand completely," Ned said finally. And then: "We're all Americans now anyhow, isn't it true?"

Now, decades later, Ned waited for Michael to make a decision about going for a pint. "
An Lucht siüil,
"Michael said out loud, shaping the sounds to fit the old language. Michael had been thinking of home a lot lately, and now, remembering the Irish for what he once was, his thoughts tripped away once more. Greta said he'd been talking about ponies in his sleep, but Michael knew he'd been awake on the night she referred to. Daydreaming at night, he guessed, though he couldn't remember ever dreaming so vividly. He'd been instructing Greta to pull out the pony's wisdom teeth so she could be sold as a two-year-old, and he only realized how little sense he was making when Greta said, "Wake up, Michael. You haven't any ponies in America. Wake up." He'd lifted himself on his right elbow to look at her, and she'd lifted herself on her left to look right back. They'd been through every phase of their lives together, and that night, for the first time, it felt as if change was in the air again. Greta could feel it too. He could tell by the way she watched his mouth and waited for him to speak. She seemed different to him that night, apart from him in a way he'd never felt before, and he felt a chill run through him that he couldn't understand. Greta, who he'd known since childhood. Greta, the girl who'd seemed so hopeless back then and who never would have believed herself capable of making the life she ended up with.