Damocles Sword

"How was the new job?" my father asked me when I got home. 

"We got off early.  A fellow was killed by some falling I-beams."  I told him the story.  I wondered how often things like this happened there.  It was already hot in the house, so my father and I decided to go out for dinner.  We would get chicken and eat it down at the docks on the big lake.  

But the death of the man was there, something that you could ignore, and it was this that directed our conversation.  My father told me stories of accidents he had seen at work over the years.  He had seen a man crush his hand in a machine, had seen another saw off all of his fingers.  But he had never seen a man get killed.  Hell, I thought, this was only my first day of work.  But it was good sitting by the lake eating with my father again and talking.  I had enjoyed being on my own, but my father was not an impediment to anything I wanted to do or be.  He was always a good guy to be with.  

That night in my sleep, I saw the man getting killed again and again, but in the dreams, my vision zoomed in on the man telescopically just before the beams came down.  He looked directly at me with wide, hopeless eyes, the two of us staring through the distance knowing there was nothing I could do.  Each time, he looked a little bit more like my father.  

My dreams were interrupted, mercifully, when the alarm went off at four.  I had to get up then to get to work by six.  I showered and had some cereal and made three thick sandwiches for lunch and was just leaving when my father got up.  It was odd to be up before my father.  He was always an early riser.  

It was dead dark when I got into my car and nobody was on the road.  Work was a long way from where I lived, and I had to drive out of my way to get Tommy's since the ancient Mercedes that his father had given him as a curse was not running very well.  I picked him up in the blue-black morning and we drove onto work as the world grew visible.  

We always got to work a little early and joined the fellows hanging around the coffee carts.  Roach Coaches, the fellows called them.  Everyone was talking in low, morning tones and drinking coffee.  It looked good and I thought I might try one.  

"Coffee," I said.  "Cream and sugar."  

"You put your own in," the fellow said, nodding to the condiments.  

I put in two creams and three sugars.  It was pretty good.  I could see why these fellows liked it so much.  I ordered a sausage biscuit to go with it, and damn, that was good, too.  I got another.  This is what it is like to be a working man, I thought.  This is what you did.

Everyone was still talking about yesterday's death of the carpenter, and people were angry.  They'd had time to think about it and to ruminate, and the consensus was that the company was responsible.  They were driving us like mules, they said, because we were behind schedule.  The union reps were meeting with the company men today.  There would be more stringent safety practices, they said.  Hell, we may strike!  Their talk filled me with indignation.  Hell, these were grown men fomenting rebellion against tyranny and corruption.  I was in the Union, and I liked it. 

We worked and the morning went by with me becoming less skittish.  I found that a few of the fellows I went to high school with were also working at this site, though none of them worked on my floor, but I saw them around once in a while.  For the most part, however, the men who worked here had been doing this all their lives and were hardened by it.  There was a hierarchy among the unions, I learned.  The steel workers union was the highest paid and commanded the most respect.  Next were the guys who ran the machinery.  Then there were the plumbers and electricians and the carpenters followed by the guys who did the drywall. Laborers were plentiful, but we made the least amount of money by far.  Still, the money was good, better than you could get elsewhere, and we were working ten hour days with the option of working seven days a week.  Everything over eight hours paid time and a half for laborers and double time for everyone else, and weekends paid double time for everyone.  Workers were cramming in all the hours they could get.  Nobody knew how long this would last.  

I was happy when lunch rolled around.  Tommy came down to eat, and we opened up our bags and took out our sandwiches.  I had eaten one earlier at break, and now ate the other two with the apple and the thermos of milk I had brought.  I was tired and the food made me sleepy, and when I slid down and laid back against the the beam on which I was sitting, I fell into one of those waking comas where you hear everything coming from far away, dozing with a semi-consciousness, a body at rest.  

And too soon, we were back to work.  In the afternoons the rain came.  This happened every day.  Who would think of building a theme park in a place where it rained every day, I wondered?  The place was sure to be a failure.  How could people be so stupid?  

The first day ended without incident, but people were still saying that we might go on strike tomorrow.  The talk of a strike, I learned, was always in the air.  It added a sense of adventure to things, it seemed, this Damocles Sword.  

After dropping Tommy off, I went home.  It was six when I got into the shower and so hot that I could not get dry after.  My father and I opted for eating inside at a fancy French restaurant for the air conditioning, but stepping back into the humid heat was terrible.  Back home, I turned a floor fan on high and aimed it at the couch on which I slept.  It was eight when I went to sleep.  The sun had not yet set.