Union Man

After six straight days of overcast skies and torrents of rain, the sun comes up bright this morning.  I've been in the dumps--bad.  Maybe that will change, too.  I was raised on sunshine.

It was summer now and getting hot in the little cracker box house.  Tommy's girl was still pregnant and starting to show a little, her mother having decided for her that an abortion in New York was out of the question.  Tommy's little brother was growing up and was a terrible little shit, a sociopath who did awful things.  I guess he'd had some good role models growing up.  He had vandalized one old woman's trailer so many times that the park's owner asked Tommy's family to leave.  Of course, to hear them talk, you would have thought it was their idea to move out.  The park was a dump, they said.  They were glad to go.  So Tommy's step-father bought a small piece of property in another part of the county, a desolate , treeless rural lot that would soon be surrounded by other trailer owners.  Tommy was moving with his family for the time being.  It was very unclear whether he would marry his girlfriend or not.  Her parents didn't seem to be pushing her in that direction.  Tommy suggested that once we began working, we should get an apartment out by our job.  My answer to that was always very vague.  

One day, Donny's father told us to meet him at the Union Hall.  The day had come for us to join.  We went early that morning to a dumpy cement block building in a shitty part of town.  Inside rough looking men sat on folding metal chairs waiting to be called for work.  The only other object in the room was a folding table holding a big metal coffee urn.  We walked up to a small teller's window and asked a gruff man if this was where we signed up.  He gave us some forms to fill out and we gave him money.  While we were filling out the forms, he would call out names and men would get up from their chairs and approach the window to get a job assignment.  The rest of the men would shuffle their feet in disappointment and grumble about not being called.  

Our monthly union dues would be automatically taken out of our paycheck each week, the fellow said when we handed back our forms.  We would be working for United Steel at one of the big hotel sites.  He slid slips of paper to us and said we should give them to the labor forman when we got to the job.  And that was that.  I had a new identity, I thought.  I was a Union Man.

"Hey, Al," one of the guys still waiting called to the man behind the window when we got our slips, "What the hell is going on?  I've been sitting here for three days. I'm paying dues, Goddamn-it.  I want a fucking JOB!"  

Donny's father, who had met us there and who had arranged things, herded us out the front door quickly.  There was trouble at the Union, he said.  Some of the members wanted to vote the union head out.  There were rumors, he said, of corruption.  

When we got to the work site, everyone was eating lunch.  We found the forman, a big guy who took our slips of paper and told us where we would be working.  Tommy drew the tenth floor and was told to look for the supervisor up there.  I would be on the forth floor with Donny's father.  Tommy gave me a look and hesitated for a moment.  I guessed he thought I had gotten the better shake.  Donny's father would be my supervisor.  

When lunch was over, Donny's father told me to clean up an area where the carpenters had just finished a job.  Carpenters didn't clean up, he said, nor anybody else.  Metal workers didn't touch wood and plumbers didn't touch electrical wiring.  There were representatives from each union to make sure that nobody made a mistake.  They were the ones who would pull the workers off the job if anything went wrong.  I was in the Labor Union, and we were grunts.  We cleaned up for everybody.  

The fourth floor was a big, open space that would be the hotel's lobby, and it was the better place to work, but I had never been on a construction site before, let alone a large high rise, and it all seemed surprisingly dangerous.  There were big holes in the floor and areas where you could fall a long way.  There were things to watch out for everywhere, to the sides, below and above.  It was the most hideously three dimensional place I had ever been.  

"Don't look at the arc welders," Donny's father had told me.  "You'll burn your retinas."  

Jesus Christ, I thought, what kind of place is this?  Just minutes before, I had come perilously close to falling into an open elevator shaft that was in a darkened corner I could barely see.  

I was standing with a broom in my hands, ostensibly sweeping, but really merely trying to stay in one place when I heard a shout from across the floor.  

"Look out!"  

Across the way, I saw a group of carpenters jump up and scramble as a bundle of I-beams slid out of their retaining strap high above where a big crane on the roof was raising them to the twelfth floor.  Quickly, they tilted and slid and began falling, twirling in the air like toys.  And just as they crashed to the floor where I worked, I saw an older man stand up, too arthritic and slow, I guessed, to get out in time.  And then he disappeared under the pile of metal beams.  He was just gone.  

Everyone stood for a second as the echo of the crashing receded, then all at once everyone was running to pull the man out.  Groups of men grabbed the heavy beams, moving them a little away from where the man lay, but there was nothing to do.  When I got there, I caught a glimpse of him before turning away. His eyeballs had popped out of their sockets.  Blood issued forth from his ears.  The man was dead.  

I walked away from the crowd, back to where I had come from.  There was nothing I could do,  and I did  not want to see anything more.  I had never seen a man killed before.  I had watched him as he stood, watched the first contact of the metal beams, seen the instant that his life had ended.  It had happened just like that. 

Some of the men began to talk.  One of them knew a little about him.  He had a wife and kids, he said.  How had it happened?  It was the crane operators fault, one said.  Why was he lifting the beams with only one tie?  You were supposed to use two.  There was too much pressure from the companies to get things done quickly another fellow offered.  We were way behind schedule.  

As we stood there, Donny's father came over and said we were done for the day.  We should come back tomorrow.  As the crowd was breaking up, Tommy came down from upstairs.  He had not seen the accident and wanted to know what happened.  

I just wanted to go home.