Marcus Sakey: The Blade Itself

Being called “Dan” always set his teeth on edge, like he was back in school, the nuns preaching arithmetic and the Holy Trinity in the same breath. Father and Son making two he could deal with, but the mathematics of the Holy Spirit had never quite added up for him.

“Everybody in town is fighting to finish before the freeze,” Danny said. “There’s what, four high-rises going up in the Loop? Plus office parks out by the airport, the new hospital. All we got is a midsized loft complex and a couple of restaurants.”

“Even if it’s the week after, we’ll be okay. Ruiz and my boys have already got the floors, some of the wall studding, a lot of the stuff we usually do later. Once the steel arrives, we’ll get the exterior up pronto.”

Danny shook his head. “It’s getting cold already.”

“Just an early chill.”

“Sure. Seventy again before you know it. We’ll be working in bathing suits.”

The younger McCloskey snorted. “You mean we’ll be working.”

Danny stiffened, then turned slowly, letting his gaze slide like he had all the time in the world. Gave the kid a street stare that mingled boredom and threat, like a predator who wasn’t hungry but would consider a sport kill. The kid’s eyes flicked to the building, back to Danny for a fraction of a second, then quick down to his feet. He muttered something vague. Danny held the stare as he spoke. “Why don’t we finish in the office?”

Neither McCloskey needed to be told whom he was talking to. Danny turned and walked to the trailer that served as the on-site office, a single-wide with cinder blocks stacked as a staircase. As he pushed open the thin door, dry air and the smell of burned coffee washed over him. Space heaters blew on either side of a cluttered desk, below cheap horizontal blinds. A tired green couch ran along one wall; Danny’s boss, Richard, liked to joke that his son had been conceived on it, usually slapping backs and braying with laughter as he said it. The trailer, one of several owned by O’Donnell Construction, moved from job to job, a gypsy home for the men who built Chicago. Danny took off his hard hat – project-manager white, as opposed to McCloskey’s blue – and walked to the Mr. Coffee.

“I’m sorry about that, Dan. He’s a good kid, a worker. He’s just young.” McCloskey stood like a supplicant, hands folded and eyes down.

Danny laughed. “You think I brought you in here to chew you out about the boy?”

McCloskey shrugged.

“Don’t worry about it. I mouthed off to a few guys in my day. I imagine you did, too.”

“One or two.” The foreman smiled.

“It’s forgotten. No, I wanted to talk privately is all. Jim, I’m sorry, but I’m going to recommend to Richard that we put this site on hold for the winter.”

“That’s a mistake. We’ve got two months, maybe more. We can get it done.”

“Maybe.”

“I’m telling you, I think we can.”

Danny paused. McCloskey was a good man, a thirty-year veteran. No point pissing in his yard. Besides, the kid’s jibe had touched a nerve, damn him. All those years of listening to Dad, dirty-nailed and half dead in the kitchen, giving his mother an earful about the goddamn management, how they came in and messed with a man’s livelihood, then drove off in a shiny new truck. That was the way most managers worked – contracting was fiercely competitive, and the unspoken rule was that the less the grunts on the ground knew about the abstractions of economics, the better.

Screw that.

Danny gestured to the card table. “Let me level with you.”

McCloskey looked surprised, then nodded, set down his hat and took a seat. Danny laid it out, the hard facts of the business. How if they split their resources trying to finish this site, they risked not getting the other two enclosed. Once the walls were up, crews could work inside, hanging drywall, rigging electrical, and detailing.

“Dan, no disrespect, but I got yard boys out there know this stuff.”

“What they don’t know is how high the stakes are now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Money’s tight. The economy, the whole Internet thing, it hit us, too. We had two projects default on final payments this year. Not bad people, just ran out of money.” Danny sipped his coffee. “You remember the office building over on Racine, our big score? That was one of them.”

“Jesus.”

“Exactly. Listen, I’d love to see this place humming over the winter. But it’s a bad play. Something goes wrong, we can’t get the other two ready…” He let it dangle, gave McCloskey time to make up his own mind.

After a pause, the man spoke. “My crew?”

“I’ve talked Richard into moving them to the other two. We’ve thrown some big bids for next year. We may have to go to shifts, but nobody loses their job this winter.”

“Me?”

“We have work for you. And you’ll get to finish here, Jim.”

McCloskey nodded slowly, the splintered toothpick in his mouth bobbing. “All right. I’ll tell the boys.”

He rose with quiet dignity, and for a moment Danny remembered his father mopping up the last egg scraps and straightening for work. He’d always taken a moment to glance around the kitchen, as though confirming everything was in the right place – wife washing dishes, son rubbing sleep from his eyes, sunbeams playing through the curtains. He’d nod, just barely, giving man-to-man respect to God for keeping an orderly world. Then he’d grab his hard hat and leave, his step marked by the shuffle from his bad knee.

McCloskey opened the door, paused. “Dan. Thanks.”

“No worries. One thing, though.”

“Yeah?”

“Call me Danny, would you?”

The foreman smiled, nodded, and stepped out. The shutting door cut off the crackle of welding and the wind’s whistle.

Danny took a sip of the godawful burned coffee and rocked the folding chair back on two legs. He felt good. He’d done what needed doing, protected the company and saved Richard’s ass – again – but he’d done it right. For a moment, he imagined how his father would have felt being included in a conversation like that, treated like a man in mind as well as body.

He suspected the old man would have liked that quite a bit.

The thought made him grin. Then, unbidden, a stretch of the Eisenhower arose in his mind. Soft flakes of snow. A squeal of tires. His smile wilted.

A clatter from outside brought him back to the moment. Forget it. Square up the paperwork here, then head back to the office. Forward motion. Forget Dad, and forget Evan.

So he was back in town. So what?

Danny was done with him.

Danny hadn’t really been in the mood for a drink, and at first he’d told McCloskey he had to get home; then, seeing what it had cost the foreman to invite a manager out for a beer, he’d said what the hell, there was time for one or two. They’d ended up at Lee’s, a workingman’s bar on Division with press-paneled walls and a faded newspaper cutout of an American flag pinned above the bourbon. A shovel-faced bartender poured their shots while he yelled at his granddaughter to change the damn music before it attracted yuppies. The girl, a petite thing with Kool-Aid hair, smilingly ignored him, nodding to the mellow electronic textures she’d put on the boom box.

They’d been there half an hour, chatting about nothing in particular, before McCloskey got serious. “Listen, Dan – Danny, sorry – about this afternoon. I want to thank you again.”

“Don’t worry about it. Really.” As McCloskey extricated a toothpick from his vest pocket, Danny took the opportunity to change the subject. “What’s with those, anyway?”