A city job. I twitched, remembering my mother’s nagging. “Get a job, any job, but go out and find some work!” I saw her dark face with its almond-shaped eyes and prominent nose, saw the papers. “Come on, sign these!”
It’s not like we didn’t suffer for that money. Besides the occasional nasty remark it was winter, and it got really cold for guys who couldn’t do something to warm up. We’d dug a trench at the bottom of the hole for the footing of what would be a massive concrete retaining wall. This wall was supposed to keep 60 cubic yards of gravel fill from crushing in the front of the building next to the hole. I thought I could at least clean debris out of the trench, but I got teased mercilessly and had to stop. For our foreman, who we called Oh!Henry, it was a matter of pride that his crew could get away with doing the least amount of work, and he would brag about it all every evening over at Stanley’s tavern. He was Oh!Henry, and he got paid better to do less than anyone else in the tavern, Ireland, and possibly the whole planet.
“Why did they raise the streets? When was that?” I asked.
That old man was right though, because we got lucky and came onto a place whose basement wall still had the windows and the front doors that had once opened onto the muddy streets of what was then Chicago. The basement also had an old wood-burning stove and an endless supply of filthy scrap lumber some madman had piled up in there. Even better, the doors still worked. So we could keep warm and take naps where no one could see us, then run out waving our tools if somebody came around to get a great picture of the loafers on the city crews.
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“Fire’s almost out, man, and my feet are getting cold. Gotta get more wood for the stove.” I gently moved Otis’s snoring body onto Oh!Henry’s equally inert form. Neither of them woke up, so I could walk to the back of the basement without a hassle. Piled to the ceiling were all kinds of rotted furniture, broken crates covered with dust, and blackened lumber of every useless size and shape. I gathered up an armload of this crap, mostly drawer fronts unglued by the floods of filthy water that periodically backed in from the main sewer after a heavy rain. I opened the lid on the top of the stove, staring in at the glowing coals at the bottom for a while, then threw the armload in, hypnotized by the ancient allure of the fire, thinking about how primitive men must have stared into the flames. And FOOM! The flammable dust from the powder-post beetles and the black, ancient sawdust ignited at once in an orange fireball, singeing my eyebrows and propelling me back into Oh!Henry’s ample belly. We fell backward, my fall cushioned by the foreman’s corpulence, the rusty folding chair strained beyond its meager powers to resist.
“Damn! That was quite a goddamn knock on the head. I swear I don’t hardly recognize this asshole here. What was your name?” He kept asking until someone actually gave him my real one, then he carefully wrote it down, sucking noisily through his teeth.
Then he got to go home because he stunk so bad the driver wouldn’t let him stay in the truck. Once outside, his pant legs got so stiff from the frozen piss that he had to do the Frankenstein strut back to his Cadillac. He tried to get some sympathy from Ruby, the only woman on the crew, but she stared at him as if to say, “Try pissing the way I have to sometime, jagoff!”
