John Saul: Black Creek Crossing

Her eyes welled with tears. Angels are blond and thin and pretty, she thought. And I’m not blond, and I’m not thin, and I’m not pretty. All I am is—

Before she could finish the thought, the door slammed open and she heard Nicole Adams’s voice.

“See? Here’s Mangy-Angey, hiding in the girls’ room, just like she always does. What’s wrong, Mangy? How come you wouldn’t leave the school? It’s your birthday, isn’t it? How come you’re not having a party? Is it because you’re so ugly no one would come?”

Angel froze as Nicole’s taunting words poured over her, and for a moment she wanted to grab Nicole’s long blond hair and jerk her head right off her neck.

Instead, she did what she always did.

She ducked her head, grabbed her backpack, and pushed through the crowd of girls who had tumbled into the room behind Nicole. A moment later she had escaped from the girls’ room, from the school, and from Nicole Adams’s taunting voice.

But as she turned the corner at the end of the block and started home, she knew there was one thing she couldn’t escape.

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t escape being who she was.

It will get better, she told herself. Someday, it will get better.

And someday she’d have a friend — a real friend who would like her just the way she was, just like Grammy had.

Like some kind of silent mantra, she repeated the words to herself over and over again.

It will get better… I’ll find a friend… it will get better … I’ll find a friend …

But no matter how many times she repeated the words, Angel Sullivan knew she didn’t quite believe them.

ARTY SULLIVAN CAST A SIDELONG GLANCE AT THE gleaming Airstream trailer that served as an on-site office for the strip mall that was supposed to have been almost done by now. It was only last week, however, that the framework began to climb above the underground parking lot the town of Eastbury, Massachusetts, had required. Pissant regulations, as far as he was concerned — not that anybody ever listened to him. But since they’d gotten held up on the garage — one of his boss’s snafus that he’d tried to blame on him, just like always — there wasn’t a chance that they’d get the place framed and closed before the New England winter set in. Which, Marty knew, meant that he and the rest of the crew would be shivering in a couple of more months as much as they’d been sweltering during the summer, when they were stuck down in the pit of the parking garage, setting rebar and pounding forms without a breath of fresh air and the heat in the nineties, with humidity to match. If he’d been in charge…

But he wasn’t in charge, and Jerry O’Donnell — the foreman who’d had it in for Marty since the day he’d signed on to the job last June — wasn’t going to listen to anything he had to say. Marty raised the middle finger of his left hand in a sour salute toward the Airstream — where he was pretty sure O’Donnell and the office girl were getting it on every day — then unscrewed the top of his thermos and took a long gulp. Though the liquid was only lukewarm, the warmth of the brandy he’d added to Myra’s crappy coffee quickly spread through his gut. When the alcohol did nothing to brighten his mood, Marty tipped the thermos to his lips again, draining it, then dropped the lid and the bottle back into his lunch bucket.

Couple more hours and he could go home.

Couple more hours of him working his butt off while O’Donnell cooled his in the Airstream. Maybe he should just go over there and get himself a little piece of the—

“Hey, Marty,” Kurt Winkowski called from the far corner of the site. He and Bud Grimes were struggling with a large piece of prefab framing. “How’s about givin’ us a hand over here!”

Glowering balefully at the trailer one last time, Marty heaved himself to his feet. “What’s the matter? That thing too heavy for you guys?” Ambling across the newly hardened concrete, he tripped over a drainpipe that hadn’t yet been trimmed, cursed under his breath, then shoved Winkowski aside. “Lemme hold it while you get a rivet in.” The piece of metal framing, ten feet tall and nearly as long, tilted as Winkowski released it. It nearly twisted out of Marty’s hands, but Bud Grimes reached out to steady it just before it fell.

“I can do it!” Marty growled. “Just get the damned rivet gun, Winkowski.”

For a moment Kurt Winkowski seemed about to argue, but Marty’s size and the look of half-drunken belligerence in his eyes made him think better of it. Picking up the pneumatic rivet gun, he moved to the point where the two pieces of framing met at a ninety-degree angle, and used his left hand to try to line up the matching holes in the two components. Bud Grimes’s piece held steady, but the framing Marty Sullivan was trying to steady kept wavering back and forth.

“Jeez, Marty, how’m I s’posed to—”

“Just shoot the damn thing,” Marty growled. “What kind of dumb mother—”

There was a sharp explosive sound as Winkowski pulled the trigger of the rivet gun, followed by a scream of pain as Bud Grimes let go of the framing he was holding and clutched at his left bicep. As the framing crashed against the fence that stood between the foundation and the sidewalk beyond, Marty Sullivan took a step to one side, lost his balance, then tumbled to the ground, the metal framing falling on top of him. He struggled for a moment, but the prefabricated structure was too heavy. “Someone get this damn thing off me!” he yelled as the rest of the construction crew came racing over.

“The hell with Sullivan,” Winkowski shouted. “It was his fault! Someone get the first-aid kit for Bud.”

Bud Grimes had sunk down onto a stack of framing, his face ashen, his left sleeve crimson with blood, despite the fact that his right hand was still clamped over the wound. Someone started toward the site office when the door of the Airstream opened and Jerry O’Donnell charged out with the first-aid kit.

“What happened?” he asked as he shouldered through the men crowded around Bud Grimes. He crouched down and opened the first-aid kit as Winkowski began to explain, then began cutting away the sleeve of Grimes’s shirt.

“Get this goddamn crap offa me!” Marty Sullivan howled, and finally two men picked up the enormous piece of prefab steel and tossed it aside. “I coulda been killed!” Marty complained, starting to get up. But then he dropped back down to the concrete. “Jeez — I think my back’s hurt.”

Jerry O’Donnell barely glanced at him. “Someone call an ambulance,” he said. “Grimes needs to go to the hospital.”

“I’m okay,” Grimes complained, but his pale face was damp with a sheen of sweat. “Just put a bandage on it and—” His words abruptly died as he tried to move his injured arm and an agonizing pain shot through it.

“You’re not okay,” O’Donnell replied. “Whatever went in there didn’t come back out.”

“It was a rivet,” Winkowski repeated. “Just as I pulled the trigger, Sullivan—”

“It wasn’t my fault,” Marty bawled. “An’ if anybody needs an ambulance, it’s me. My back’s—”

O’Donnell wheeled around to face him, his eyes hard, his expression tight. “Your back’s fine, Sullivan,” he said. “But if you want, I’ll sure have you taken to the hospital. And I’ll have ’em test your blood for alcohol while you’re there.”

Without thinking about it, Marty Sullivan was on his feet, towering over the foreman, his fists clenched, his face only inches from O’Donnell’s.