Invasion of the Blatnicks

by Neil S. Plakcy

  Junior clapped Bill on the back. “Anything you need done out here, Steve, you come to Bill. Then you go out and do it yourself, if you want it to get done.”

  There was a loud twang over Bill’s right shoulder and all three of them turned to look. Two guys were trying to get a piece of sheet metal in place so that it could be riveted, and they couldn’t seem to get it braced.

  “Aw, shee-it, that ain’t the way you do that.” Bill dropped his cigarette and ground it into the dirt with the toe of his worn cowboy boot. “Let me show you ignorant assholes how to work with sheet metal.” He strode over to the men in a gait that jerked his right leg along a half-step behind. “Cain’t you fellas do nothing right?”

  Junior and Steve went in the other direction. Junior was a big man, six foot six in his running shoes, with shoulders like a linebacker and the beginning of a gut that slipped just over his belt, and Steve was scared of him. Steve kept looking at his watch as if there was a specific time when they’d be able to go back inside.

  It was hot and humid and a bug bite on the inside of Steve’s arm had begun to itch. The site seemed much bigger than it had the day he toured it with Max. Knowing that he would have to learn where everything was and how to get from place to place made it seem that much more complicated.

  The mall was shaped like a dumbbell, with a long arcade down the middle and a big restaurant at each end in place of department stores. Junior led him through narrow passageways, down long open corridors and around piles of debris and construction materials. It was dark in the mall, and there were electric cords strung everywhere with occasional bulbs hung from them. Steve thought that if Junior disappeared he’d be stranded out there, like Will Robinson and his parents on Lost in Space, without even a robot to warn him of danger.

  Without the stores, the planters and the escalators and all the other things that gave a mall a human scale, the structure looked enormous. “We have fifteen feet slab to slab,” Junior said as they walked, pointing up at the floor above.

  Steve looked up at the underside of the decking and the wire-mesh reinforcement where the concrete for the second floor had been poured. He could see how the steel beams supported the decking and the way all the pipes were hung from steel bolts drilled into the concrete. It was an insight into the structure of the world, the complex and interconnected network that held everything together.

  “Come on, I want you to sit in on a meeting,” Junior said. They walked down to the far end of the mall, to a cavernous space lit only by a few bulbs swaying on a cord high above. No finishes had been applied yet to the dull steel, which was rough and scaly, like the skin of a giant dinosaur.

  A dozen men converged around them, leaning against a piece of plywood stretched over sawhorses or against the walls. Steve stood in the background, shifting from foot to foot, until Junior started to introduce him. He shook hands, inhaled cement dust mixed with cigarette smoke, and felt out of place, until the meeting began and he could slide back into the shadows again.

  It seemed to Steve that Junior performed like an intelligent dancing bear on speed. He dispensed with the preliminaries quickly, working from memory rather than from written notes. “Form work!” he roared. He pointed a big hand at the carpentry superintendent. “Forms for all the column footings from column line P to column line T. By tomorrow!”

  The carpenter nodded. Junior pivoted to face another contractor, who was leaning against the wall behind him. “Concrete!” he said. “Give me a pour the day after tomorrow. And no chickenshit excuses, either.”

  “You got it, Junior,” the man said, saluting.

  Another pivot. “There are no trusses for building C,” Junior bellowed. “Where are my trusses? They were supposed to be here yesterday.”

  “They’re coming from Alabama,” the unlucky superintendent said. “They’re held up by rain in the Panhandle. They’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Alabama?” Junior said. “Ala-fucking-bama? Who the hell buys roof trusses in Alabama? We don’t have good enough roof trusses here in Florida?”

  “They had the best price,” the super said. “And they were supposed to meet the delivery date.”

  “Probably put together by a bunch of cotton-pickers,” Junior said. “I’m holding you personally responsible for those trusses. If they’re not here by tomorrow I’m kicking your sorry ass all the way to Alabama. You can go join the fucking cotton-pickers.”

  After the meeting, Junior and Steve walked back to the trailer, where it was air-conditioned and at least a little more like a job than an adventure. “Celeste, set up that office next to mine for Steve,” Junior said, leaving Steve at the receptionist’s desk. “And hold my calls for a while. You know what a bunch of fuck-ups those engineers are. If I don’t sink my teeth into these sewer drawings we’ll probably end up flushing toilets into the fountains.”

  Junior picked up a thick roll of blueprints and brandished them at Celeste. “Make sure Steve gets everything he needs. I don’t want to hear any whining about staplers or rolodexes.”

  “Yes, sir,” Celeste said, saluting Junior crisply.

  The office was full of furniture-- two desks, one on top of the other, and at least six chairs piled haphazardly around the room. There were several dog-eared sets of blueprints in a heap in the corner, and a half-inch thick layer of dust had settled over everything. Celeste picked up a chair and started out of the room with it, and Steve did the same. “How did you meet Uncle Max?” she asked.

  “At Newark Airport.” As they cleaned, he described the flight.

  The phone rang occasionally and Celeste answered with a lilting, “Everglades Galleria,” raising her inflection at the next-to-last syllable. “I was working at the gas company when Uncle Max came in,” Celeste said, shaking her head. “I hated that job. We had to wear light blue uniforms with our names on little oval tags. Uncle Max saw right away that blue was not a good color for me.”

  When Junior passed by, Celeste roped him into helping Steve move the second desk out of the office and into the reception area. “Maybe Uncle Max will take the hint and hire someone to help me,” Celeste said.

  “You mean you want someone to hold the nail file while you run your nails over it?” Junior asked. “Get real, Celeste, if you were any less busy you’d be dead.”

  Celeste shook her head and said, “Hmph,” but Steve could see a little bit of a smile in her eye. She gave Steve a sheaf of paperwork to fill out and left him alone in his new clean office. The walls were a cheap simulated walnut and the floor was linoleum tile. It was a far cry from the plush, carpeted area where he’d worked in New York, sitting across from a computer screen all day. The only noise in that area was the sound of computer keys being pressed and an occasional deep sigh or lowered voice on a private telephone call. Here he could hear Celeste at the main switchboard answering calls or talking excitedly in what he thought must be some kind of Caribbean patois.

  Tractors roared past outside, and in the distance the pile driver pounded steel into the swampy ground at regular intervals. Occasionally he heard a woman in an office across from him talking about common area charges, percentage rent and gross leasable area. It seemed like an office where people made things, where at the end of the day he would be able to point to something he had done that was visible and concrete, something more than pages of numbers he’d added or subtracted or calculated in ratios and formulas. It was exhilarating.

  Around eleven-thirty the woman across the hall stuck her head in his office. “Hi, I’m Miranda.” She was a flouncy blonde in her mid-twenties, pretty underneath a halo of baby fat, dressed in starched white linen with a lace collar. “Are you visiting or staying?”

  “Steve Berman.” He stood up to shake her hand. “Staying, for now at least.”

  “Terrific.” She looked at her watch. “I’m late, I’ve gotta run.” She peered at her reflection in the glass of a framed poster on the wall. “Do I look beautiful?”

  “Sure,” Steve said.

>   “I love you already,” Miranda said. “We’ll talk.”

  Steve followed Miranda out to the front of the trailer, where Junior introduced him to Maxine, the director of leasing, and the other leasing agent, Brad. “We’re a happy crew,” Junior said.

  Maxine was a tough blonde in her late forties who looked like she bit the heads off chihuahuas in her spare time. “Don’t believe a word Junior says,” she said to Steve. “That’s the secret to getting ahead in this company.”

  “One secret,” Junior said. “The other secret is to stay out of Maxine’s pants. The last guy in there disappeared, although every now and then he sends out little tiny postcards with the word HELP written in big letters.”

  Junior and Maxine traded bright, fake smiles. Maxine wore a turquoise silk blouse, leather pants that only went as far as halfway down her calf, and blue high-heeled sandals. A gold charm reading “Maxine” dangled from a chain around her neck and rested between her pushed-up breasts. Her blonde hair was shaped like an elongated bowling ball that was flat on top, and it appeared as stiff and unyielding as the fake wood panels in Steve’s office.

  Brad’s voice had the whiny timbre Steve had come to associate with gay men in New York. It was pitched one tone too high, and there was something precise about the way he dressed that made Steve feel uneasy, particularly since his own clothes were dusty and the back of his shirt was stiff with dried sweat.

  Brad, Miranda and Maxine were going out to lunch to discuss leasing in the food court. “I think it’s apropos, don’t you?” Brad asked Steve. “I mean, discussing the food court over lunch?”

  Steve shrugged and looked at Junior. “We’ll order in from the deli,” Junior said. “Come on, Steve, Celeste can show you how to work the computer.” Steve pulled up a chair and sat down next to the receptionist’s desk.

  After a while the delivery boy from the deli pulled up outside. Steve watched out the window as the boy crept toward the trailer. Celeste opened the door and beckoned him in.

  “All clear?” the boy asked, climbing the steps.

  “All clear,” Celeste said. “Junior’s in the back.”

  The boy brought a tray of sandwiches and drinks in and set it down on Celeste’s desk. She handed him the money out of petty cash, and he scribbled out a receipt. As soon as he handed it to her, he turned and ran from the trailer.

  “He’s afraid of Junior,” Celeste said. “He won’t come in unless I tell him the coast is clear. Sometimes I have to go out to his truck to get the food.”

  Steve, Junior and Celeste ate together in the conference room, along with several other people who appeared out of the bowels of the trailer and who no one bothered to introduce to Steve. After lunch, he went back to his office and called Dan Farber at the bookstore.

  “So how’s the first day?” Dan asked.

  “Hard,” Steve said. The prospect of poking and prodding at the complex mesh of people, equipment, materials and land to find out where he belonged seemed very daunting. “And scary, too.”

  “Scary? Why?”

  Steve looked around at the scarred walls of his office. In the next room he heard Junior yelling at a contractor. “It’s like I’m doing something real,” he said. “I’m not just manipulating numbers and computer files.”

  He sat forward in his chair in his earnestness. “And it matters. You read those horror stories of buildings that come crashing down, and all these people get killed. Working people, and little kids in short pants, and old people with schnauzers. Suppose I authorize the wrong material, the wrong grade of steel or the wrong mix of concrete, and walls topple, or the ceiling falls in, or the foundations shift?”

  “I think you’re going a little overboard,” Dan said. ”I mean, you’re just a junior flunky there. It’s not like you’re Donald Trump or Trammell Crow.”

  “That makes it worse. At least those guys know what they’re doing.”

  “Nobody knows what they’re doing,” Dan said. ”Those guys just bluff better than most people.”

  Steve would not be distracted. “But what if I’m getting in over my head? Maybe I should find another office job, sit behind a desk from nine to five, get my life back in order?”

  “You really want that?”

  Steve sat back in his chair. “No, I don’t.”

  “Then stop complaining. Listen, I’ve got a customer. Go build something.”

  They hung up. Celeste buzzed and offered to continue his computer lesson, and he walked up to the front and sat down with her. She was showing him the database program when the trailer started to shake from side to side. Then one side rose up, and the power went off. “Jesus, Mary, Mother of God,” Celeste said.

  “Is it an earthquake?” Steve asked, holding on to Celeste’s desk.

  Maxine came stumbling out of the back of the trailer, clutching the walls like a drunk on a ship. ”There’s a goddamned tractor out there!” She banged on the window. “Put us down, god damn you!”

  She turned to Steve. “You’re in construction. Make him stop!”

  Steve stumbled out the door. From the porch, which had been torn in two, he waved wildly at the operator of the tractor, which was really more of a very large forklift. He had the forks underneath the trailer and he was trying to wrest it from the ground.

  The operator cut the engine off. “They told me to unload the trailer,” he said. “I didn’t know there was people in it.”

  Junior came out the door behind Steve. “Not this trailer, you idiot!” he screamed. “That trailer!” He pointed at a large tractor trailer filled with wooden pallets of concrete blocks.

  The operator looked in the direction Junior was pointing. “Oh.” He turned the machine on and backed away.

  Junior shook his head. “Do me a favor,” he said to Steve. “Go out and get me an electrician and a plumber. We’re going to have to redo all our hookups.”

  He turned and nearly fell off the broken platform. “I’ll get a carpenter, too,” Steve said.

  Before he walked over to building A, Steve stood out on the dusty road and looked back at the trailer, sitting at a crazy angle, half on and half off its mountings. He laughed and swatted at a mosquito. The conversation with Dan had reassured him. This was where he wanted to be. It would require him to think more, to understand more, and certainly to sweat more. But he was determined to succeed. He began to sing the fish song again, as he turned and began the long dusty walk out to the site.

  7 – A Hundred Small Ways

  The walls in Steve’s apartment at Mangrove Gardens were an eggshell white, and the drywall was smooth and unmarked. Steve felt guilty putting up his posters with push-pins and hammering nails for the framed pictures. The movers arrived on Wednesday afternoon, and he worked for hours that night setting up the bed, positioning the furniture, and hanging up his clothes.

  He did some unpacking every night for the rest of the week at work, making numerous trips out to the dumpster with empty boxes, but he began to feel settled once his clothes were in the closet, his boxes were unpacked and the apartment had begun to look like a place someone lived, not just a storage depot for items on their way to the Salvation Army thrift store.

  He felt more comfortable on the site, too, as he mastered names and relationships and understood who was responsible for what. Junior had him reviewing construction contracts, so he spent most of the day in his office reading, cross-referencing drawings, and writing out lists of questions.

  On Thursday Steve was surprised when Celeste buzzed him and said there was a Cindy Levine on line two for him, did he want to take the call? He wanted to.

  Cindy was just calling to say hello, she said, and see how he was. She had gotten his change of address card, with the new phone numbers, had begun to miss him in New York, and wondered if he was coming up north any time soon.

  “I don’t think so,” Steve said. “I mean, I won’t be getting any vacation for a while. Maybe you could come down here for a visit some time.”

  As
soon as he said it Steve was sorry. What good would it do to drag Cindy down to Florida? He was changing rapidly, moving away from the MBA he had been in New York, and to him that meant moving farther from Cindy.

  “I might come down some time in November,” she said. “Maybe for Thanksgiving, if that’s all right. I know your family always makes a big fuss.”

  “I’ll ask my mother,” Steve said. “I’m sure she won’t mind having someone else at the table.”

  “And what about you? How do you feel about me coming to Florida?”

  “I don’t know what to tell you, Cindy,” Steve said. “Everything is different down here. I need some time to get adjusted.”

  There was a pause and then Cindy said, a little too brightly, “So, are you going to tell me about your job?” He tried to talk about what he was learning, how the site worked and how the construction was going, but he could tell she wasn’t interested. When it was her turn, she talked about the politics in her office, about what had happened to her on the subway that morning and how she had made a great impression in a meeting the day before. But Steve just wasn’t interested either.

  Finally Cindy said, “I have to go. I have a meeting. Think about Thanksgiving.”

  Steve forgot about Thanksgiving almost as soon as he hung up the phone, because Celeste buzzed to say some drawings had been delivered for him, and Junior had a contract for him to review, and Brad had a tenant he wanted Steve to meet. Even seeing his parents that night, when Rita came out to appraise the decorating potential of the apartment, did not remind him.

  Steve hadn’t seen Rita so motivated since her retirement, and it made him feel good to see her active and interested. “You could put mirrors on that wall there,” she said in the living room. “It would reflect the view from the balcony.”

  “No mirrors, Mom,” Steve said. “This is only a rental, remember?” He sat down on his old couch and put his feet up on the coffee table.

  “You’ll be buying a place of your own soon,” she said. “Well, anyway, you need a new couch. A sectional would be very nice. Maybe something in a leather with brass trim.” She was wearing a light green jogging suit and she leaned down to pick a piece of lint from one leg.