This Side of Brightness (26 page)

They curse loudly as they move through the streets. They never give way. The businessmen seem small and useless and feminine around them.

Sometimes one of the workers puts a finger on one nostril and blows a stream of snot to the ground, and a businessman is disgusted and curls his upper lip, but the workers move on, indifferent, through the morning rush hour.

Clarence Nathan's new tan construction boots have already been worn so much that rings of hair have been rubbed away where the leather uppers touch his legs. A talisman of sorts. A charm. His blue T-shirt clings tight to his torso. In the wallet in his back pocket he carries his grandfather, his dead mother, his wife, and his three-year-old daughter. His hair has fallen out of the Afro that Dancesca gave him, become long and straight once more. Up above, if he raises his head, a skeleton of his own creation rises toward a cloudless Manhattan sky. Some of his fellow workers will remain at the foot of the building, slinging chokers; others will hang clips to ropes and lean out dangerously over the middle section of steel; others will reside all day in its corridors, fixing elevator shafts, twisting electric wires, grouting, hammering, painting, sheet-rocking. But Clarence Nathan will go higher than any other walking man in Manhattan.

After coffee in the shanty, he joins the ironworkers at the elevator and they rise, aristocratic, in the air. Fourteen men, two teams of seven. The cage rocks in the wind. There are no glass panes, just bars across their knees, hips, chests. Beneath him, Manhattan becomes a blur of moving yellow taxis and dark silhouettes. There is something in this rising akin to desire, the gentle rock from side to side, the cooling breeze, the knowledge that he is the one who will pierce the virginity of space where the steel hits the sky.

All Clarence Nathan's colleagues are sinewy. A couple of them are Mohawks, their blood distributed in such a way that it is balanced in all parts of their bodies: it comes from their history, it is a gift, they have pure equilibrium, the idea of falling is anathema to them. Others are from the West Indies and Grenada, and there is one Englishman, Cricket, who serves his vowels as if holding them out on a set of tongs. He is thin and blond and pockmarked and wears a lightning-bolt earring. Cricket was given his nickname for trying to teach the other workers his native game while standing at the top of a crossbeam. After shining an imaginary ball at his crotch, he put his head down, ran along the narrow beam to display the technique of bowling, making his arm spin in a giant circle. His watchers sat and stared as Cricket almost fell—there was thirty feet of space beneath him to metal decking—but he caught himself by the strength of his arms, dangled, grinned, pulled himself up, and said, “Leg before wicket, gentlemen!”

The elevator clangs and stops. Clarence Nathan finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup, and walks across the metal decking toward two ladders that jut up in the air. For a joke the men call this area the POST, the Place of Shriveled Testicles. No ordinary man will go further.

The nimblest—Clarence Nathan and Cricket—take the ladder two rungs at a time. Their leather belts are filled with tools, and their long spud wrenches knock against their thighs. They climb three ladders to the very top of the building, where columns of steel reach up into the air. The foreman, Lafayette, in thick-rimmed spectacles, pokes his head up from the top of the ladder and says, “Another day, another dollar.”

Careful with how he steps, Lafayette walks across the loose decking. Cricket goes with him, saying, “Another day, another dolor.”

Clarence Nathan remembers his mental maps of yesterday: where certain pieces of equipment were left, where the holes in the decking might be, where on the roof he might accidentally kick over a bucket of bolts, where a can of beer might have been discarded at the end of the last shift. Radios crackle and voices babble over the airwaves. The men watch the huge yellow Favco cranes swing into action, bringing up beams and columns of steel. The metal is inched through the air. When the steel is laid on the decking, Lafayette decides in what order the men will build. The ironworkers wait and chat.

The quietest among them is Clarence Nathan. He says hardly a word, but sometimes, when the foreman is not around, he and Cricket challenge each other to walk blind across the beams. They move as if on solid ground. If they fall they will not go far, but thirty feet are as deadly as one hundred. Eyes closed, they never miss a beat.

On the decking, Clarence Nathan turns his hardhat backward, tucks his hair underneath. The signalman speaks in a language of coded radio signals to the engineer in the crane. A huge steel column is hoisted; the men jostle the column into position, and then it gets bolted in at the bottom. The column jags up against the sky. The crane swings a jib line with a spherical ball on the end of it—the men call it the headache ball. Lafayette whistles for a man, and Clarence Nathan gives him a thumbs-up. The line comes toward him.

He reaches out to grab the cable, steadies it, and, with superb insouciance, steps onto the small steel ball.

Suddenly the jib line moves and he is swinging in the air, in nothingness. He adores this feeling: alone, on steel, above the city, his colleagues below him, nothing on his mind but this swing through the air. He holds on with just one hand. The engineer in the crane is careful and brings him slowly up toward the top of the column. The headache ball swings slightly, then stops. Clarence Nathan shifts his weight and moves lightly out onto the thick steel flanges of the column—for one single second he is absolutely free of everything; it is the purest moment, just him and the air. He wraps his legs around the column. On the opposite column, Cricket is waiting. Then the Favco swings a giant steel beam toward them and it inches through the sky, carefully, methodically, and both men reach out and grab it and bring it toward them. “All right?” shouts Cricket. “Okay!” They wrestle the beam into position with brute strength, sometimes using large rubber hammers or their spud wrenches to knock it into place. The sweat rolls quickly down their torsos. They insert bolts and turn them loosely; the bolter-uppers will crimp them tight later on. And then the men unhook the chokers—the beam now sits between the two columns, and the skeleton of the building is growing. Clarence Nathan and Cricket walk along the beam and meet each other in the center. They step off into space and onto the headache ball, arms around each other, and descend to the decking, where the others wait. Sometimes, for a joke, Clarence Nathan takes out his harmonica at the top of the column and blows into it, using just one hand. The wind carries most of the tune away, but occasionally the notes filter down to the ironworkers below. The notes sound billowy and strained, and for this the men sometimes call him Treefrog, a name he doesn't much care for.

“All right!” Treefrog says, when he and Angela reach the end of the first beam.

Angela is breathing hard. Even in her fur coat he can see her chest rising and falling. “No way in hell you gonna get me up there!”

“It's simple.”

“Get me down. You just wanna knock. You just like all the rest. I don't feel good, Treefy. Oh. Treefy.”

“It just looks higher than it is, that's all.”

“I want my shoes.”

“Just imagine you're on the ground.”

“Well, I ain't.”

“If you think you're on the ground it's easy-peasy.”

“I ain't a child,” she says, as she wipes a stream of blood onto her fur coat.

“I never said you were.”

“I'm staying here. Get me my shoes.”

“They're down there, goddammit.”

“I ain't leaving till I get my shoes.”

“All right, then, stay here.”

“Don't leave me, Treefy. Please.”

“Just watch me.”

He places his hand in the hold that he has chipped from the column and, within seconds, he is up on the second catwalk. Five feet below him, Angela still has her arms around the concrete column as if she's bandaged there. Treefrog wraps one leg around the beam and leans down and takes her hand and—close to violence—he swings Angela through the air and grabs her at the waist and tugs her up. He expected her to shout and scream and kick, but all she says is, “Thanks, Treefy.”

Angela sits shivering on the beam. She has stopped crying and she blinks her good eye several times, wipes more blood from the other.

“I don't feel good.”

“All you gotta do is walk across here. Relax. See? Up there. Don't look down. Don't look down, I said!”

“He hurt me.”

“I know.”

“Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“I want you to kill him,” says Angela. “Kill the asshole. Stuff his throat with a blue washcloth.”

“Okay.”

“Don't kill him, Treefy.”

“All right already. Whatever.”

“You're gonna let me fall.”

“Trust me. I worked on the 'scrapers once,” he says.

She stares at him. “I'm scared.”

“It's okay. I promise nothing will happen to you.”

“You're weird.”

“You ain't exactly normal yourself.”

“I'm normal! Don't call me disnormal.”

“All right all right all right. You're the normalest woman I ever saw. Come on.”

“You're cute, Treefy.”

He stands behind her and guides her across the narrow beam. Her steps are slow and precise, and he keeps his arms wrapped around her: only weather stops him—the steel becomes slippy with fog and ice and rain, and lightning is the most dangerous of all. The men have a makeshift rod at the top of the building, but at the first sign of heavy storms they are given the day off. When weather is good, they go at the rate of a floor a week. The sun bounces off the metal, but at least there is a wind to cool the ironworkers down. Although it's against the rules, Clarence Nathan often works without a shirt. He has a body still free of stab wounds and scars. The foreman, Lafayette, talks of frozen waterfalls in Canada, of climbing on thick ice with special shoes and ropes and carabiners and ice picks, of staying in sweat lodges and incanting chants to the sky. Clarence Nathan likes the thought of it—suspending himself on a river—and he imagines himself halfway up the face of a fall, water trickling behind the ice.

On Fridays, at the end of the shift, the men drink beer together on the top beams, sit in a row, let their legs dangle over, and drop the beer cans into the nets way beneath. They like to achieve this appearance of nonchalance; nonchalance is their greatest gift. They will not be seen without it. Even if they become aware of moist cloud settling around them, they will stay and sit and talk. Beer cans pop. Hardhats are clipped onto carabiners at their waists. Many of the hats have stickers: Harley Davidson insignias, badges from the New York Mets, an emblem from Yellowstone National Park, a circular sticker from the Hard Rock Cafe, and, quite often, Canadian flags with marijuana leaves in the center. The men chat about their upcoming weekend—who they will see, how much they will spend, how many times they will get laid. Their guffaws get carried off by the wind. Only the faintest of sounds rise up from the city; an odd siren, a truck horn. They wait until Lafayette is gone and then take out bags of coke and thin red straws and sometimes a little dope. Matches flare the end of joints. Razors chop through large white grains. One man cups his arms around a fat line of coke so none of it blows away.

High on marijuana—he doesn't snort coke—Clarence Nathan talks to the helicopters that come across from the East and Hudson rivers.

After work, he takes the train to 96th Street and walks the rest of the way home with the sun arcing downward in the west. His spud wrench hangs from his construction belt and taps in rhythm against his thigh. He still feels as if he's up on the beams, floating, and he makes absolutely sure his feet don't touch the cracks in the pavement. It's a short walk home to where he lives with his family in a small apartment on West End Avenue and 101st, but he goes down to Riverside Park first, smoking as he walks. Sometimes—before he reaches the park—he stops at a parking meter and works on his old trick, balancing on top of the meter on only one foot.

He keeps his head down and counts his steps as he goes. A curious thing, he likes to land on an even number, although it's not absolutely necessary. It is just a game of his. In the park, he often gets bothered by male hookers offering him a blow job. The park is one of their favorite haunts. “Not today,” he says, and sometimes he is whistled at; they like it when he wears sleeveless T-shirts, his arms are fretted with muscle. At the door of his apartment there is the traditional joke—“Honey, I'm home!”—and Dancesca appears as if she's just climbed out of the television set, makeup precise, hair in beads, dark skin, white teeth, their young daughter holding on to her leg. In the hallway, Clarence Nathan takes off his shirt and Dancesca rubs her fingers over his chest and pinches him playfully. Lenora stands outside the shower room as he cleans off the day's work. When he emerges, he lifts her and spins her in the air above his head until she says, “Daddy, I'm dizzy.” After dinner, he puts the child to bed. On her bedroom wall Lenora has tacked up a huge sheet of see-through blue plastic, which she calls her aquarium. Beneath the plastic there are cut-out photos of fish, shells, plants, people. A Polaroid of her parents, at their wedding, is positioned near the top of the aquarium where her favorite people go. Photographed outside a registry office in 1976, Clarence Nathan wears a wide brown tie and flared trousers. His hair is short. Dancesca is already in a maternity smock. They look embarrassed, bewildered. She folds her hands over the stomach bulge. He has his fingers knotted together nervously. Their shoulders barely touch. But vaguely triumphant in the background is Walker, who, without a hat, is pointing comically at his own bald crown.

There is also a black-and-white of Walker posing with other sandhogs in the mouth of a tunnel. All the other men seem stern under their large mustaches, but Walker, covered in muck, looks happy. A shovel leans against his hip, his hands are folded beneath his arms, and his muscles bulge.