Your first day on the job, the only thing they tell you is, “Don’t look down.” I haven’t met a sky boy yet who took that advice. You step onto one of those girders 50, 60, 70 stories up, and all you want to look at is your feet, to make sure there’s something solid underneath. Eighteen inches of unbendable steel and on either side of that, just gravity.
If Clara had seen us out on that girder, she’d have probably hopped a train for Chicago without me. Our legs dangled out in the ether while we ate our lunches out of cardboard cake boxes. Some of the guys were preening a bit for the camera, goofing around and cutting up. Fitzgerald told them to knock that shit off unless they wanted to show up in the paper as an obituary instead. All the same, the photographer had us out on that beam sitting in a line, squeezed in tight. We could feel every fidget. Every time one of the guys pulled a cigarette out of his pocket, the motion rippled through all our bodies like plucking a taut cable. You couldn’t help but look down.
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Matty had a whiskey bottle in his left hand, empty, and he kept letting it slip like he was going to drop it. At the last second, he’d dart out his other hand just in time to catch it. Sonny started yelling at Matty to knock it off, which made Matty fling the bottle higher into the air before catching it. It really ruffled Sonny’s feathers, but he couldn’t reach the bottle to take it from his cousin, and didn’t want to risk jostling him, anyway. Matty had already polished off whatever was left in the bottle that morning.
We didn’t give anyone too much guff when they got shaky in the knees. Even the veterans would get the spins from time to time and spend a few minutes hugging a column or crawling back toward the elevator shafts, where there were planks of thick plywood laid out for a floor. We all had our ways of coping. John Cook kept a fistful of dirt in each of his pockets, and when he was waiting for the cranes to deliver a girder, you’d see him with a glove off, his fingers shaping the dirt in his jeans like packing a snowball. Sonny knelt down and said a long prayer whenever he started work. For my part, I liked to spit tobacco. Every time I caught a rivet in my bucket and placed it in the frame, I’d hawk a big one and watch it float out on the currents. I’d focus in like an eagle hunting a chipmunk for as long as I could and try to plot its trajectory as it dove and spun toward the dirt below.
We made our way toward the outside of the building, where the plywood floor came to an abrupt end. Sonny was standing over his coal furnace, dropping in rivets. Sweat had already begun cascading down his face and chest. I showed Charlie how Sonny would throw me rivets, and I’d catch them in my pail and place them. Then Matty would buck them up while Josef flattened the stems with the air gun. “Follow me,” I said. “We’ll get you some pictures that’ll sell some papers.”
“Down here, not so hard,” she said. “But nothing at stake on the sidewalk. I step off, I lose the game. Big deal. I don’t go splat.”
“This is what I do,” I said. “Once this job is done, we’ll see about Chicago. I promise.”
