Chin - 04 - No Colder Place

by S. J. Rozan

  “Fuck you, Lucca,” Buck muttered. Maybe it was his morning greeting. He added, “And fuck Joe. He don’t scare me.”

  “We’re down here,” DiMaio told me. Buck got to his feet as Mike DiMaio and I started along the scaffold.

  “Joe’s the foreman?” I asked as I followed him. Like some other muscled short guys I’ve known, DiMaio walked with a bowlegged gait, like a sailor.

  “Joe Romeo,” DiMaio said over his shoulder. “Stay out of his way. You make your quota, do good work, Joe leaves you alone, which is what you want. He’ll break your balls some, being you’re new, but just ride it out and he’ll find someone else.”

  We stopped two bays over, where the brick courses rose only to knee level, anchored with shiny steel tabs into the rough gray concrete-block backup. The backup was all in, dark rectangles sloppy with mortar enclosing the building top to bottom, barriers between in and out with voids at their centers where the window openings gaped.

  “You seen the drawings?” DiMaio asked me.

  “No.”

  “A lot of pain-in-the-ass stuff on this job, corbels, arches, setbacks like over here.” He pointed at a dull steel column about sixteen inches in from the building’s skin, standing in an unfinished collar of brickwork. “You’ll get into it. Work slow when you start, ask questions if you got ’em.”

  He cupped his hands around his mouth, yelled through the window opening toward the center of the building. “Phillips! Yo, Betty Crocker! We’re ready to go anytime, you wanna bring some of that batter over here! Make it chocolate,” he added.

  Staring hard into the dimness inside, I made out a small concrete mixer half hidden by stacks of blocks and pallets of bricks. A black man lifted a hand in response to DiMaio’s shout. He pulled a lever and the mixer disgorged gray sludge into a wheelbarrow standing under it. Shoving the lever back to start the mixer up again, the man stuck a shovel in the wheelbarrow and headed in our direction.

  “We got the plan up over there, you want to take a look at it,” DiMaio told me, pointing to the other side of the wall. “You can get in two bays down, where Phillips is coming out. Or you can go over.”

  I went over, climbing the sides of the scaffold and swinging myself in through the window opening to land with a thud on the scuffed concrete inside the building. I felt a cool touch of air, the air from inside, on the back of my neck.

  “What happens if the safety officer catches me doing that?” I asked DiMaio as we faced each other through the opening.

  “Joe’s the safety officer on this crew. Nothing happens.”

  I studied the plan, a tattered print of the architect’s drawing, now marked with pencil and thumbprints and coffeestains. Another drawing was taped there too, the brickwork details, and I saw what DiMaio had meant. Arched windows with true keystones; projections at some columns, setbacks at others; patterns made by alternating the long and short sides of the brick, turning and stacking it, edging it forward and back, that would read on the face of the building. This wasn’t a brick skin stretched taut, reading smooth and flawless as glass or steel, brick fighting for a place in the slick, modern machine world. Bricks are laid one by one, each measured weight held by a hand, each rough surface considered and handled and placed. When this building was complete you’d know that, see it in the movement and the patterns and the shadows cast by the bricks on each other.

  DiMaio, with a smile, was watching me study the drawings. “What do you think?” he asked me. “Worked like this before?”

  “Not for a long time.”

  “Since your apprentice program, I’ll bet. Me neither. You’ll get into it, like I said. Gives you a chance to show off.”

  “I’m not even sure my apprentice program covered stuff like this,” I said doubtfully. “Did yours?”

  DiMaio shrugged. “I started working with my old man when I was eight years old. My apprentice program was after school and weekends and summers.”

  “He taught you to do work like this? He was good, your old man?”

  DiMaio grinned the ready grin. “He’s still at it. Except for me, he’s the best.”

  I went back to examining the drawings. “Must be expensive. I know it’ll slow me down. Why are they doing it?”

  “Hey, I’m just a bricklayer, what the hell do I know? Architect got a bug up his ass, sold it to the owner. Why not? Keeps you and me pulling down a paycheck, anyway. Hey, lookit, it’s Phillips, dropping his morning load. Whaddaya say, Reg?”

  “Move your butt, will ya?” Phillips answered cheerfully. DiMaio moved aside as Phillips maneuvered the wheelbarrow past him on the scaffold. “Reg Phillips,” he said to me, and we shook hands as I gave him my name. He was young also, maybe twenty-five, a thin, dark-skinned man with a thicker mustache than DiMaio’s. “Heard some poor sucker got—Jeez, I mean, I heard Mike here got a new partner. Listen, he gives you any trouble, you just come see me, okay?”

  “Go back to your chemistry set and let the real guys get to work, Reg,” DiMaio told him.

  Reg Phillips threw a fake punch at DiMaio, who ducked, weaved, threw one back. The scaffold shook with their footwork. “I’m gonna have to report you for horsing around on the scaffold, DiMaio,” Phillips said, dropping his arms. He turned, stuck the shovel into the mortar in the wheelbarrow, and loaded a couple of piles of it onto a board set on concrete blocks between me and DiMaio. “That good for you, Smith?” he asked.

  I stuck a trowel into the mortar, worked it around. DiMaio watched as I did it. “Seems fine,” I said.

  “You want it up higher? Considering you’re taller than some of these midget masons they got around here?” He jerked a thumb at DiMaio.

  “What happens if I say yes?” I looked at my new partner.

  “I throw you off the scaffold,” DiMaio answered. “Just like I’m about to do to Mr. Nobel Prize here. Hey, smart guy, how much money you lose last night?”

  Reg Phillips grinned. “My money, you sorry-ass white boy, was on the Yankees.”

  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 Jo
e 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-co
vered 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?”