“He’s from the union,” Brad said, motioning to the Cuban. “He thought this guy was a scab.” He pointed to Richie.
“What local?” the foreman asked.
Brad translated. The foreman was from the Broward local, the Cuban from the Dade branch. The foreman held out his hand to the Cuban, who said something in Spanish that everyone took for accepting the apology, and they shook hands.
Steve turned to the crowd. “All right, the show’s over. Everybody get back to work.” He hesitated for a moment, hoping his voice had sounded strong enough. The men turned away.
“I want to speak to you, Cousin Richie,” Steve said, pulling his cousin back. “Since when are you a union carpenter? The last time I looked you were walking behind an asphalt truck.”
“That’s bogus work,” Richie said. “My uncle Dusty, he knew this guy in Jersey who knew somebody down here in the union. I got my journeyman’s card now.”
“God help the union then,” Steve said. He stepped close to Richie. “Listen to me and listen good, Richard Herbert Fenstersheib. I don’t want you making trouble on this site. You get into one more little situation like this and I’ll personally kick your ass back to New Jersey, union card or no. Do you read me?”
“Jeez, you’re grumpy today.”
“Beat it, Richie.”
Richie backed away. “All right, cuz, chill out. I’m going, I’m going.”
“I love it when you get macho,” Brad said.
“Brad, you’re weird, you know that? And I’d prefer it if you wouldn’t be weird to me out on site, OK?”
“You handled that just fine,” Bill Benzakry said, stepping out from behind a column. “Damn fools didn’t even know they were on the same side.”
“Except for the fact that the dumb one is my cousin, you’d think they’d know each other,” Steve said. “Have some kind of secret handshake, or password, or decoder ring.”
“There’d be no fun in it if all the good guys wore white hats and the bad guys wore black ones,” Bill said. “I figure I’d have to get me one that’s gray.”
Brad walked toward the exit, stopped, and motioned to Steve. “Come on, I’ve got a meeting.”
Steve tossed Brad his car keys. “You take the car back. I’ll walk up in a few minutes.” He was hot and sweaty and tired, but he didn’t want to go back to the trailer. He knew as soon as he got in there’d be a call from his mother, or a contractor with questions, or some meeting he was supposed to sit in on. He was lonesome and sad and just wanted to be by himself.
He looked around at the busy site. The sun had come out from behind a bank of clouds and it was hot and sticky. The back corner, where a shallow stream nurtured a wide variety of foliage and small creatures, looked cool and inviting against the sun. It was just the place where no one would bother him.
Steve walked through a screen of palm trees and sea grapes. Ferns and weeds and an occasional stand of sawgrass clustered in clearings, leaving bare dirt around the bases of the trees. A single mangrove was trying to root in the shallow water of the stream. Under the canopy of leaves, it was cooler and quieter. Steve could barely hear the earth movers across the site.
He parted the broad round leaves of a sea grape and found a small face staring back at him. The face belonged to a blonde girl, no more than four or five years old, with a smear of dirt on her right cheek. She looked right at Steve and said, “Tunisia.” Then the leaves rustled and she disappeared.
At first Steve thought it was the heat, or else that he had entered a time warp and been trapped in some strange movie, where little girls appeared from nowhere and spoke the names of North African countries. He sat down by the river bank to think.
There was no reason for a little girl to be out at the back edge of the site. Either he was crazy, or there was something strange going on. Since working for Thornton, and dealing with the Blatnicks, involved constantly reminding himself that he was not crazy, he had to look into the strange stuff.
He got up and started to walk through the foliage, looking for signs of the little girl. He moved slowly, turning his head from side to side, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He was just about to give up when he saw, nestled in the roots of a sea grape, a brief flash of pink. He leaned down and picked it up.
It was a delicate pink slipper meant for the foot of a Barbie doll, or some other miniature high-fashion type. It wasn’t much, but at least he felt vindicated. Where there are Barbie clothes, he reasoned, there is a Barbie somewhere in the neighborhood. And where there is a Barbie, there is a little girl. Ergo, he was not crazy. The world worked again. He pushed onward through the foliage.
He stopped before a small tent in a clearing. There was a pile of children’s picture books at the base of an Australian pine, and a man’s white t-shirt was hung from a branch. Next to the tent a kerosene lantern sat on top of a pile of plastic supermarket bags. And in front of the tent, the little girl he’d seen before was sitting cross-legged on the ground, playing with a Barbie doll wearing only one pink slipper.
The dirt in front of the tent had been swept clear of twigs and leaves. The little girl looked up and saw Steve standing there. “Hi,” she said. “My name is Tunisia.”
“Who you talking to, honey?” came a woman’s voice from within the tent. Then the woman’s head poked out. She was blonde, too, and her straight hair hung limply to her shoulders. She looked up and saw Steve. “Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
She moved slowly out of the tent, crawling on all fours. Then she stood up, putting one hand on the small of her back, and Steve saw she was pregnant. “I suppose you’re here to tell us we’re trespassing.”
Steve shrugged. “No. Are you?”
“We guessed so,” she said. “But we didn’t have no place else to go.” She stretched her back. “Tunisia, honey, go round back and bring Momma the chair, all right?”
Tunisia jumped up and ran around the back of the tent. “It isn’t much, but it’s home,” the woman said. Tunisia reappeared, dragging a folding chair. “I’d offer you a seat, but we haven’t got but the one.” She motioned to the ground. “You’re welcome to sit if you want.” Steve walked forward a little and sat cross-legged in the dirt.
He handed the tiny pink slipper to Tunisia, who smiled shyly and thanked him.
“You live out here?” he asked her mother.
“The last three months,” the woman said. “Ever since John broke his arm and couldn’t work. We couldn’t hold on to the apartment.”
Steve felt like he had stepped into The Grapes of Wrath. He asked a few more questions, and learned that the woman, Mary, and her husband and Tunisia were from Ohio originally. John was a construction worker and they had come to Florida so he could work year-round without going out into the cold. Then he’d broken his arm.
Steve didn’t know what to say. He stood up and brushed himself off. “I have to get back to work.”
“You won’t report us, will you?” Mary asked. “It’s just we ain’t got no place else to go.”
“I won’t report you.” He leaned down and patted Tunisia’s head. “Nice to meet you.” He turned and walked away through the undergrowth. When he got out to the hot sun it felt good on his back.
As he walked back to the trailer he couldn’t decide what to do about the woman and child. It was clear they didn’t belong on the site. What if Tunisia wandered out and got in the way of some construction equipment? He didn’t know much about property law, but he thought maybe the family might be establishing some kind of squatter’s rights, something that would get in the way of the Everglades Galleria at some point. He didn’t know what to do, so he put the thought away, to come back to it later.
By the next morning, he was on the site early. He had not forgotten about the homeless family, nor had he figured out what to do about them. He stood near the Welcome Center, watching a mass of gray thunderheads blow in from the western Everglades and cover the sun. Big palm trees with their roots in burlap sacks
swayed restlessly on an open trailer nearby. Then his radio crackled with Celeste’s voice. “Base to all units. There’s a problem in Building A. Somebody get out there fast.”
Jesus, Steve thought, what now? He took off for Building A at a run. As he got closer, he heard shouting. No tool noises, no saws, drills or hammers. He ran down a long service corridor crowded with debris, and into the main mall. “Jesus!” he said, and jumped back, as a rat ran past his feet. When he looked up he saw rats all over the place. Guys had dropped their tools wherever they’d been working and taken off. Two carpenters rushed past Steve and down the corridor. Within minutes the building was nearly empty, except for Steve, Junior, Bill, and the other superintendents. And hundreds of rats. Wherever they’d discovered somebody’s lunch in a bag, there was a swarm of furry bodies. There were rats in the fountains and planters, and scurrying back and forth across the common area.
Steve joined Junior and Bill at the back corner of the mall, where they were looking at makeshift cages that had been used to bring the rats into the mall. There was also a crudely lettered sign which read, “Here are some more non-union rats for your project.”
Junior got mad. He picked up a two by four and was just about to swing it down on top of the cages when Steve said, “Junior! Don’t!”
“Why the hell not?” Junior growled.
“Because if you break the fucking cages we won’t be able to send the rats back where they came from.”
Junior put the two by four down. He and Bill turned to Steve. “What do you mean?” Junior asked.
“I’m still working it out,” Steve said. “But right now we need to get the rats locked up.” He picked up the two by four Junior had dropped and lined it up leading to the cage. “Let’s build a corral,” he said. “See how many of these rats we can drive back in. Junior, you radio Celeste and have her send out to the deli for some cheese or something. Come on, Bill, let’s round up the guys and get this thing moving. This union business is my problem and I’m not letting anybody get the better of me.”
Steve and the guys built a crude corral to drive the rats back to the cages. The delivery boy was, as usual, too scared of Junior to come out to the site, so Celeste showed up at the door with a big wheel of Jarlsberg. “Oh, my, look at all the rats,” she said. “I’m not sure we have enough cheese.”
“Somebody get a saw,” Steve said. “Let’s get this fucker cut up.”
They cut the cheese into big wedges and dropped them strategically along the path they wanted the rats to follow, then closed them in by moving the two by fours. It took almost an hour, but they got nearly a hundred rats back into the cages. “I didn’t realize there were so many rats on this site,” Steve said, leaning up against a wall and wiping the sweat from his forehead. He took his glasses off and cleaned them on his shirt tail.
“So now what do we do?” Bill asked.
“I’m thinking about trailers,” Steve said. There was a little cluster at the west end of the site, where each of the main contractors, including the union plumbers, electricians, and drywallers, had their own trailer, for storing materials and holding private conferences. Junior and Bill nodded in agreement as Steve explained his idea.
They loaded the cages of rats onto the back of Junior’s pickup truck and hid it in a grove of trees at the very edge of the site. Then the superintendents rounded up the contractors again and got everybody back to work.
That night, Junior, Bill and Steve met back at the site at ten o’clock, long after the last workman had gone home. There was a night watchman on duty, but he recognized them and waved hello. They stopped in front of the electricians’ trailer. Bill took care of the big padlock on a hasp on the door in minutes, using leverage and thick pliers. They took one cage of rats and placed it inside the trailer, leaving a note on top of it. The note read, “These rats don’t give up and neither do we.”
Steve stood in the doorway of the trailer. “I hope this works,” he said. He pulled a string that opened the cage, jumped back, and slammed the trailer door shut. Bill and Junior were ready with concrete blocks that kept the door closed. They repeated the practice with the drywallers’ trailer and the one belonging to the plumbers. As they walked away from the last trailer, Steve could hear the little squeaky noises the rats made as they scrambled around inside. “I don’t want to see any more rats,” he said.
“I think you might see a few more tomorrow,” Bill said. “The two-legged kind.”
And he was right. The next morning, Angelo Ronalli, Pete Wickstaff and Phil Sears were at Steve’s door by eight-thirty. “After careful review of your proposals, we’ve decided to accept,” Ronalli said.
“Truce?” Sears asked.
“Truce,” Steve said, smiling.
17 – That Loving Feeling
By the fifteenth of December, construction at the Everglades Galleria had slowed dramatically. Dozens of masons, carpenters, plumbers and laborers called in sick or used accumulated vacation time. Junior took advantage of the slow time to move the team from the trailers into the Miccosukee Welcome Center, taking over a suite of offices on the second floor that would eventually house a museum staff.
Steve spent most of his time behind his desk, catching up on contracts and drawing reviews, and Rita called him daily, sometimes twice a day if there was a late-breaking news flash. Harold had taken an interest in the Florida Club, which unfortunately for Steve freed up more time for Rita to spend on the phone. She kept Steve abreast of the travel plans of all the Blatnicks, asked his advice about Christmas dinner, and commented on major news stories.
“I’m going to see if we can get the phone number here switched to a different exchange,” Steve said to Rita that day. “One that would be a toll call for you. Or maybe I can hire one of these santeria people you read about in the papers to cast a spell on you that makes you think I’m still in New York.”
“If you don’t want me to call you, I won’t call you,” Rita said. “All you have to do is say the word.”
“What word? I’ve tried no, stop, don’t, please, and go away, and none have worked. How about scat? Shoo? Git?”
“I can see you’re having a mood,” Rita said. “Honestly, you can be just like your father sometimes. Your father, thank God, is at another of those Florida Club meetings. He wants us to go on some kind of houseboat tour of the Everglades. For a week! Can you imagine?”
Steve noticed that the picture across from his desk was crooked. He got up, holding the phone to his ear, and walked to it. “That’d be terrific, Mom. I’ll bet they don’t have phones out there. I think you should go.”
“Why don’t you come by tonight? We’ll talk about it.”
“Oh, no, I’m smarter than that,” Steve said, adjusting the picture, then leaning back to make sure it was straight. “You’re not tricking me into coming over to your house. I’ll see you on Christmas and we can talk about it then.”
After he hung up, Steve went out to visit Tunisia and her family. He hadn’t been able to make any new friends in Miami, since he spent so much time at work and with his family, so it was nice to go to the Blakes’ camp and hang out, the way he would have done with Dan Farber in New York.
Before Steve stepped into the woods, he looked back at the site. No one was paying attention to him. He tried to be careful, because he was afraid if anyone else discovered the Blakes, they’d be forced to move.
John was sitting in front of the tent on one of a pair of folding chairs Steve had found in a closet at the trailer, with Tunisia on his lap. He was teaching her the alphabet from one of her picture books.
“Hi, Steve,” she said, when he parted the reddish green sea grape leaves and stepped into the camp. “I can spell your name.” She was barefoot and her blonde hair was pulled into a neat ponytail banded with a pink ribbon.
“That’s great, Tunisia,” Steve said.
“All right, school’s out.” John lifted Tunisia down off his lap with his good arm and she ran off behind the tent.
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br /> “How’s the arm?” Steve asked.
“Better every day,” John said. “Looks like I’ll be able to go back to work soon.” He stood up, a thin man with a serious face and a long blond ponytail.
Mary came back to the camp with some wet clothes over her arm and Tunisia following her. “Hi, Steve,” she said. She started to hang the clothes in the tree, and Steve jumped up to help. “I’m not an invalid. I’m just pregnant.”
“I know,” Steve said. “But I can’t help it, it’s the way I was brought up. You know, if I’m out with my mother, and we come to a door, she stands there until I open it. Even if she’s way ahead of me.”
“Some women are like that. I’m more independent.”
“Hey, that reminds me,” Steve said. “I brought you a present.” He handed Mary a package wrapped in brown paper. “You said you wanted to learn about plants in the swamp.”
Mary unwrapped a book. “The Living Everglades,” she read. She looked up. “Oh, Steve, this is great! Tunisia, honey, go get that flower we found this morning. We’ll see what it’s called.”
She held the book out to John and said, “You’re too nice, Steve. You shouldn’t go spending your money on us.”
“I want to,” Steve said. “You’re my friends.” There was a pause and then he said, “You know, it’s funny, you guys being named John and Mary, such common names, and giving Tunisia such an unusual one.”
“I was always fond of that name,” Mary said. “We learned it in school one day. It’s a country in Africa on the Mediterranean sea. Its Arab population is mostly Moslem, its capital is Tunis and its main exports are phosphates and petroleum.” She smiled. “See, I remembered all that, just because I liked the name. When it came to our little baby girl, we didn’t want to give her a name that anybody else would have.”
“How about the new baby? Do you have a name yet?”
“I have an idea,” Mary said. “But I’m not saying anything yet.” Tunisia came back with the flower, and she and Mary paged through the book until they could identify it. “Tomorrow we’ll got look for some more, all right?” She looked up at Steve. “I think if we can make this time out here a good experience, we’ll be fine,” she said. “Come on, me and Tunisia will walk you out.”
Invasion of the Blatnicks Page 15