by Atticus Lish
“So why won’t you tell me who he is?”
“I’ve told you everything you need to know about him.”
“I just don’t get it. What do you think, I’m going to steal your friend?”
“Let it go.”
“Are you making up the fact that you have a friend?”
“No. He’s a real person.”
“Tell me one thing about him so I know he’s real.”
“I already have.”
“Is he old or young?”
“I can tell you that he’s young.”
“Is he a student at MIT?”
“Maybe.”
“Is he a physicist?”
“No.”
“Is he my father?”
“No. I said he was young. Your father wouldn’t be young, would he?”
“Yeah, but you could be lying.”
“The fact that you think it’s your father shows your paranoia. Why would you ask me that? I’d have to be a pathological liar to be friends with him behind your back. What does that say about our friendship that you believe something like that about me?”
“So it’s not my father?”
“If you ask me that again, I’m going to consider our friendship nullified.”
“Is it or isn’t it?”
“Look, I’ve given you an ultimatum, I’ve set my terms, and you are choosing to violate those terms. This conversation is finished.”
“It’s not finished. I’ve got a right to ask you. If you’re such a great friend, what are you so secretive for?”
“An individual doesn’t have the moral right to demand to know everything about another person. That’s a basic moral principle.”
“I don’t disagree.”
“In asking all these prying questions about this other person who I’m friends with, you’re violating that principle. You’re flying directly in its face. You’re flagrantly violating a basic human right.”
“That sounds a little overboard.”
“We know you’re this super-aggressive person—”
“What?”
“You’ve been in street fights, you’ve been arrested, you’ve fought in cage fights. Let’s look at the salient facts and assess what’s going on here. You’re in court with your father, who you drove out of your house. By your own admission, you needed him to help your mother. What did you do? You chased him away and destroyed his property. You’ve admitted to me that you sucker-punched some poor guy in Cambridge and knocked him out cold. He could have brain damage because of you. I’m two hundred ten pounds and I work out all the time and I’m afraid of you. I feel like you could just flip out and start destroying things. Most people would be afraid of someone bigger than they are; you show no concern about what would happen to you. Sure, I talk about violent ideas and stuff, but they’re symbolic messages to my own psyche to help me do better at my studies, but with you, you’re willing to actually attack another person, almost like a wild animal. You used to care about ideas and conversations, and now it’s like that’s totally out the window. You’ve dropped out of school; all you want to do is fight, work at a construction job, and—I don’t know—probably vote for the next Republican candidate who’s going to get our country into wars. You’re going to wind up like a caricature of a dumb, uneducated redneck who just runs around getting drunk and raising hell.”
Corey stared at Adrian. Then both of them started laughing.
Adrian stood up to dump his tray, loaded with chicken bones and skin, and farted loudly in the center of the dining hall. The three young women by the window looked at him. Corey hurried away in mortification.
“What did you run away for?” Adrian asked. “Oh, I get it! Everyone runs from my power.”
The cold, gray, sometimes wet days kept rolling on and on. There was no early spring this year. He saw Molly one-on-one when she was back in town later that month. They met in the same Irish bar, the Ash, drinkers framed against the stained-glass windows of white and green. Hooded in a heavy sweatshirt, snowy with plaster dust, cowhide gloves sticking out his pocket, he rested his boot on a table rung. She sat on a high chair, purse in her lap, drinking beer. He tapped her bottle with his fist. She’d offered to buy for him since she was older, she rarely got carded, and if she did she had ID—it was known between them he was still something of an innocent.
“How’s school going?”
“The same. Lotta work. I thought I was going to the nationals this year, but it looks like that’s not going to work out. Coach says I’ve got some work to do. There’s next year. I’ll be fine. I’m a freshman and it’s pretty good I got as far as I did with it. But it would’ve been badass to go. Whatever. It’s not like I don’t have ten thousand hours of homework to keep me busy. The nationals for track. I thought you knew. I run the quarter mile. They’re going out of state too. I so wanted to go.”
“How fast do you run a quarter mile? I don’t know anything about track. I have no idea how fast I could do it. I don’t think I’m in the best shape. I’m probably creeping up on 168. All I do is eat.”
“Aren’t you working?”
“Working makes me hungry. It’s the weather too. It’s gotta warm up.”
“At least you don’t drink.”
“How’s the party life out there?”
“Off the chain. Girls in my dorm get more wasted than I’ve ever seen. Last weekend, I woke up with such a bad hangover, I was like, never doing that again. That was after I found out I wasn’t going with the team. I’m over it now.”
“I’ve been to court like three times since we talked. There’s been a lot going on with my father. He’s telling the court I pulled a knife on him.”
“You didn’t, did you?”
“No, I didn’t. What does that even mean? Pulled a knife and did what? Poked him with it? Buttered some toast? Where did this happen? When did it happen? What was I trying to achieve? It’s a total fabrication. As far as would I pull a knife on him, I’d just as soon knock his head in with a hammer—that’s the point I’m getting to. But that’s would, not did.”
“Come on, Corey. I don’t want you knocking his head in with a hammer.”
“Why not?”
“Because then you’ll go to jail—that’s why!”
“Oh yeah. Well, jail’s not that scary. When I got arrested, I didn’t see anybody impressive.”
“All right, all right.”
“No, seriously. The scariest people are young people like you and me when they’re in top athletic shape. We can do the most damage. You think some old guy has your wind? Your cardiovascular conditioning?”
She was letting his comments pass.
“You know who’s scary?” he continued. “I’ve got—I don’t want to say a friend—an acquaintance—who goes to MIT. This guy’s scary intelligent and he’s completely jacked. Benches four hundred. If this guy decided to hurt people, it’d be a problem.”
“He would be a brainiac if he goes to MIT.”
“Yeah, but this guy’s unusual. We’re not friends anymore because he’s so unusual.”
“What’s unusual about him?”
“He’s smart, he’s strong—he’s basically everything I want to be—and he hates his mother. I couldn’t hang around him anymore. I just went to see him—”
Molly laughed.
“Don’t laugh. I hadn’t seen him since November and after this, I’m not going to talk to him again; he’s too crazy. Really! I don’t have time for his malarkey. I’ve got my mom to look after. But the guy interests me somehow, hearing his perspective, the way he’ll take everything and reduce it to a rational problem. He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever met. But what’s crazy is—you know how my father works at MIT?—I started thinking he and my father must be…being friends.”
“Wel
l, that would be weird.”
“I asked him and he won’t admit it.”
“Why do you think this? Do they even know each other?”
“They do. I introduced them. And then he was saying he had a friend who took him to strip clubs and my father popped in my head. Now I’m telling you and I don’t know what to think.”
“I can’t see my father going to a strip club. Yes, I can. Probably when he was younger.”
Seeing Tom’s serious stoic face in his mind’s eye, Corey said, “Your dad’s a decent human being.”
“Mostly.”
“He’s the man.”
“You know, I wonder about you dropping out of school. Don’t you want to do something besides construction?”
“Your dad’s in construction.”
“You’re not my dad.”
Corey said nothing.
“Don’t take it the wrong way,” she said. “All those books you used to read, the sailing bible—yeah, I heard about it—I admired you.”
“That’s funny. I admired you.”
“I don’t want you to be one of those guys, when I’m graduating college, you’re stuck here doing nothing.”
“I won’t be. I’ll do something. But I can’t do anything now; I have to take care of things at home.”
“You could be studying. You could take your GED.”
“I gotta deal with this court case with my disgusting father. For all I know, the guy is friends with my friend behind my back. He’s so devious, that’s exactly what he’d do. But I have no idea. It could be true; it might not be. It doesn’t matter. I’m cutting all the weirdos out of my life so no one can bother us again.”
23
You and Me, the Labor
Corey’s Labor Ready assignment was ending. The project was done. His super was having him clean the new windows with acetone. Landscapers were planting trees along the curbs. UMass was a Division One school and Molly was running in the postseason, thinking about next year. When she returned to Quincy to see her father, she was tan and conditioned and seemed to have been painted in brighter colors. Her long reddish-gold hair whipped behind her. She hugged her girlfriends and drove away with them amid a great celebratory energy. Hiking down the shore with his tool belt, Corey leaned in the window of their car and bumped her fist. He said his job was ending. She told him not to be shy about talking to her father. “Don’t let him scare you. He likes helping people. You should call him.”
“Think you can use me now it’s getting warm?” he asked her father.
“To be honest, I don’t know.” But Tom offered to show him around his worksite.
He picked Corey up on Sunday. The snow-white Ford shone in the sun. Corey jumped aboard. A mug in the center console was filled with ballpoint pens and a bone-handled folding knife. A Navajo dreamcatcher hung from the rearview mirror. A die-cast skull was glued to the dashboard—a gift from Molly—her dad liked the Grateful Dead. Tom was wearing a do-rag and a lime-green safety shirt in double extra-large. His well-worn boot hit the gas and the truck sped away from the ocean.
They took the Yankee Division Highway inland past the South Shore Plaza, then the granite cliffs. They drove into a town. A white sign in Massachusetts style: Entering Dedham. The Ford roared along, the radio playing Neil Young. They were cruising by old warehouses on a country road—heavy construction equipment in dusty lots, blocks of stone, piles of lumber, hills of sand against a background of trees.
Tom was telling Corey how he’d gotten his job. “When I got laid off, I sent out my résumé. These guys called me in. They’re the second-largest commercial HVAC company in New England. I’d subbed for them in the past. They knew me. They said, ‘We want to give you what you’re worth.’ We shook hands.”
After they’d hired him, he’d had to prove himself. He’d passed his licensing exam within a year. It had taken six months of studying at his kitchen table. Then he’d graduated to running jobs.
Tom pulled up outside an industrial hangar, turned the truck off and continued talking with his keys in his hand. He said they’d given him this vehicle that he and Corey were sitting in, and a laptop computer with Bluebeam on the hard drive, a type of software allowing him to size tin with the click of a mouse.
“They pay for my gas. All I do is turn in my receipts.”
He got out of the Ford. Walking slowly, faded green tattoos on his arms, he led the way to the hangar. They were surrounded by rural silence, tall trees, sunlight. He entered the combination in the key case, unlocked the doors, let Corey in. The inside was cavernous and cold and smelled like wet cement. Construction materials were piled everywhere: iron I-beams, coils of cable, sheets of green glass, machines waiting to be installed. Tom pointed to a mountain range of silver ductwork.
They walked deeper in, stepping through the frames of uncompleted walls. Another room. A plywood board that lay across a pair of sawhorses. It said Tom’s Table in Magic Marker. A roll of blueprints. Wooden crates on the floor, mock-ups for his rooftop units. Tom got down on his knees and demonstrated how, by measuring carefully, he laid them out on the floor exactly where they would go on the roof above their heads: blue tape for cold air, red tape for hot.
“Want to see what this place’ll look like when it’s done?”
They left the site and drove to a sister factory, which was nearing completion. When they went inside, the lights came on, illuminating a pristine white-walled stadium. The machines had been assembled into a series of production lines. High overhead, Corey saw Tom’s ductwork in the ceiling—high pressure, medium pressure, low pressure—coming through the walls, dividing and subdividing in perfect lines like the complex of pipes in a pipe organ, a giant system that descended in scale down to the registers in the clean rooms.
There were no doglegs.
“No,” said Tom. “It’s got to look perfect and it’s got to work perfect—or you’re going to have to have a tech come out every weekend.”
The project above their heads had taken fifty man-years of labor, counting all the men and time. Tom had gotten it done ahead of schedule. The owners had a blackboard in their office that showed everybody’s jobs. He’d seen it. “If you’re in the black, it means you’re on-budget. All these guys are in the red, but I’m always in the black.”
The plant was going to manufacture powdered substances for the vitamin-supplement industry like Gloria’s vanilla protein powder or Corey’s Gaspari muscle-builder shake from GNC.
“I’ve tried the chocolate,” Tom said. “It tastes good.”
They went outside and walked around the hangar. “Construction is a stressful business. The numbers are huge. Each one of those rooftop units you saw is twenty thousand dollars and we’ve got ten of them.” He walked slowly, head down in the sun, boots crunching in the dirt.
* * *
—
“Thomas!” someone called out when they were crossing behind the hangar. It was an electrician at work inside a caged area where high-voltage lines connected. They went over to talk to him through a fence.
“Working on a Sunday?”
“Wiring the boxes. We’re putting the big switch in tomorrow. Who’s your buddy?”
“This is Corey. He’s interested in what we do.”
“If you’re interested in construction, stick with Thomas,” the electrician said. “He’s the man.”
“I know he is,” said Corey.
“I’ve been telling him we show up on time and get it done.”
“That’s what we do. That’s why we can make it fun. We get it done, then we can have fun with it.”
“We’re always doing something. Remember the mug? We’ve got this mug we give people. It says Biggest Sanchez of the Year. A Sanchez is a guy who sleeps with your wife. He’s like a Jody in the military,” Tom explained. “And another thing is zip ties.” As a joke, they�
��d zip-tie each other’s equipment. They zip-tied each other’s feet to ladders. If they didn’t like a guy, they crawled under his truck and zip-tied his drive train. You’d see him go halfway down the street and stop. He’d think something was wrong with his transmission.
The men laughed. A short, broad man, wearing all his safety gear, fall-protection harness, yellow hard hat, cowhide gloves and safety glasses, his many tools kept neatly around his waist, the electrician, whose name was Victor, gave an impression of unusual competence and judgment allied with good cheer. The thing that rose out of the cage above his head resembled a cubist sculpture of a vacuum cleaner several stories high. It drew air out of the factory and ran it through a filter and, if necessary, shut down power to the entire plant to prevent a dust explosion. The high-voltage lines six feet above his head could fry you.
They took their leave of him. “Nice to meet you, Victor,” Corey said.
“He’s good people,” Tom confided on their way back to the truck. “It’s taken me years to get guys like him, guys who are reliable. They’re not easy to find.”
And Tom looked after guys like that and kept them busy. If he had to send a guy home, he bought him McDonald’s on his own dime. He didn’t like to send guys home, but sometimes he had to for the budget. “I see all the money on the job. You know what the cheapest part of any job is?” He poked Corey in the shoulder. “You and me. The labor.”
“I’d do anything to work with you,” Corey said.
They climbed back in the truck and drove out of town without talking. Tom picked up the highway. Corey looked out the window, feeling the strange high-speed sense of stasis, the hovering stillness in relation to the other traffic moving seventy, seventy-five miles an hour. They seemed to crawl beneath the Braintree cliffs as they headed for the shore.
Tom started talking again as they were driving into Quincy. He said not everyone loved him. A persistent issue was coordinating the elements of a major installation. Not infrequently, the other trades would fail to work with him. They were supposed to miss each other, but if a plumber didn’t read the blueprints, his pipes would run into Tom’s ductwork. In these conflicts, the other tradesman would lose. “I tell guys, ‘Look, you can do your own thing, but you’re only hurting yourself, ’cause I can’t move my stuff. Look at the prints. I told you exactly where I was going to be, this many feet above the floor.’ ”