Michael Thomas - Man Gone Down

I open my eyes, wait for them to readjust, and look north toward Manhattan and then south out to sea. Smaller bodies of water are much easier to navigate — smaller bridges, smaller boats. I go to scan the water once more, but even from this far off I hear the sick clang of the 7:30 bell. I shoulder my bag and go.

I forgot my pry bar. I turn on Carroll. The building is two lots in, across the street. I’m still fifteen minutes early, so I wait on the corner. It’s a brick town house — narrow — only about seventeen feet wide. The facade is a mess. It’s covered by peeling goldenrod paint. The bricks that are exposed need to be repointed. There isn’t a straight row to be found. The wall seems to ripple from top to bottom even in this still air like a tent side in the wind. The cornice is about to fall off. I’m surprised the whole thing hasn’t tumbled down already.

The windows are boarded up, so I can’t see what they’ve done inside, but it seems to me that the first thing we need to do is get a scaffolding set up in case it does decide to fall. If not that, then we’ll have to shore it up from the sidewalk—2x12s on toeplates, leaning at a sixty-degree angle, pushing against more 2x12 plates placed horizontally against the brick. It seems a bit rigged, but maybe they’re trying to save money. Regardless, it’s incredibly careless to leave a two-ton pile of loose bricks waiting to fall. Perhaps they’re going to knock the whole thing down. If that’s the case, I don’t know why I’m here.

A flatbed turns the corner and stops in front of the building. It’s carrying a forty-yard dumpster, ROLLOUT CARTING stenciled on its side. The driver hangs an enormous tattooed arm out the window — flames and dragons, from what I can see. He’s got a blond King Tut beard shooting from his chin, long sideburns, and a shaved head. He’s wearing wraparound sunglasses. He leaves the truck running, radio blasting the Stones—“When the Whip Comes Down.”

He sees me and shuts everything off. He waves me over while opening the door.

“What’s up, brother?”

I nod back. He jumps out of the cab. He’s massive — big headed, thick necked, simianlike torso and arms. He beckons to me again but crosses to my side while doing so.

“Hey, brother!”

I nod again.

“¿Yo hablo inglés?”

“Yes.”

“This your job?”

“No.”

“Cool. Cool. I thought I’d be late. What time you got, brother?”

“About ten of.”

“Shit. Maybe I am late.”

He reaches into his back pocket and produces a multisheet invoice.

“Brother, do me one. Sign this so I can get the fuck outta here.”

I look at it, not to read it, but to kill time.

“Ain’t nothin’—just something saying that I got here with my shit and everything’s okay.”

I look at the dumpster. Five hundred and fifty bucks for a dirty steel box, suitable only for hauling crap.

An old van pulls up. It looks like an auctioned-off cop van. It still has some of the old NYPD markings on it, but there’s a rack with ladders on the roof and a big padlock on the back. Two men slide out of the passenger door. I recognize them from old jobs — Vlad the Toothless and Roman the Scarred. Vlad stops on the sidewalk and looks up the wall. Roman heads to the back of the van. The driver points at him.

“That the chief?”

I shrug. He nods and does his ape strut over to Roman, who’s unlocking the back. “Hey, brother!” He waves the sheets at Roman, who ignores him and opens the doors. One by one, small brown men climb out of the back and gather around the stoop. Roman claps his hands like he’s introducing a troop of performers. When they’re all by the stoop, he points to one, whistles, and dangles keys in the air. The man takes them. Roman points at the makeshift plywood door up the stairs, whistles, and waves him up. He points to two more men, then to the van. He barks, “Let’s go!” They break rank and disappear into the van.

I hear the distant church bell clang. It’s eight. No carpenters. No foreman, just the masons. I cross the street and head for the stoop. Vlad greets me.

“My friend, can I help you?”

“I’m here to work.”

“You need job. You need work?”

His voice is remarkably gruff, a smoky belch-bark, but he smiles, wide. He only has a few molars left, and his gums are gray but for some reason it’s not unpleasant to look at. The soft flesh tempers his voice, almost makes me believe that there is good nature in his smile.

“I have work.” I point at the wavering facade.

Vlad shrugs his shoulders and looks away. “I don’t know, amigo.” He whistles at Roman, who’s fumbling with keys, trying to lock the back of the van. They meet beside it, then walk a few paces, whispering in Polish as though I understand what they’re saying. They break. Roman whistles at me. Vlad walks past me — no smile — and slides across the front of the van into the driver’s seat.

“My friend! Amigo!” Roman stands in his place, waving to me, ever quickening.

“Inglés? English?” I remember now. He shouts everything. No one can move fast enough for him — not even himself. He has a wide keloid scar that starts at the inside of his right eyebrow and travels diagonally across his nose, his cheek, down to his neck, then turns back, stopping atop his Adam’s apple. “Cancer!” He’d told me years ago. “ I go home, they take it out!”

He pats his clothes for his cigarettes. He doesn’t find them. He grimaces, stretching the skin on his face, making his scar look like it will tear open. He relaxes, squints, trying to remember what he did with them. His eyes open again, wide, as though he didn’t know I was there. He waves me off.

“Go in! Work!”

I climb the stairs to the top of the stoop and look into the open doorway. There’s nothing inside — no framing, no stairs, no roof, no back wall. Just a ditch with three rotten joists below and a rigged extension ladder going down two stories to a rough cellar slab. The small brown men are already down there with shovels, a pick, and a sledge. Roman comes up the stairs behind me.

“What? Get down! You want to work, go down!”

He’s carrying empty joint compound buckets, two stacks of four. He pushes them to me.

“Throw them down, amigo!”

I take them, turn, and feel for the first rung with my foot.

“My friend, no!”

I look up at him. He spreads his arms in mock exasperation and hisses a short blast of breath.

I climb down with the buckets, with my bag. It doesn’t seem like a true descent because of the missing back wall. The big sun has already risen above the young sumacs and the one-story warehouse. It’s gotten about ten degrees hotter than when I first stepped outside. There aren’t any clouds to be seen.

When I reach the slab, Roman barks something incoherent from above. He’s found his cigarettes. He lights one with a Zippo — that was it, he used to always watch his men work while playing with his lighter. He was always preceded by its clicking and the butane smell. I can’t smell it down in the hole, not only because it rises, but because the ditch is an amphitheater of stench: the mustiness of the walls — years of water seeping or evaporating out of the failed mortar joints — the dank foundation wall, and the stink of the urine-stained weeds in the back garden.

“Okay, amigos! Vamanos!” yells Roman, checking his watch. “The truck comes to pour at three!”

I look up at the wavering front wall. I wonder how I will breathe down here. I look at the other men. They don’t seem concerned with anything, and this momentarily dispels the sense of danger. There are six of them, ranging in size from small to tiny. They seem familiar with each other, but they don’t seem to be friends, countrymen even, just coworkers, set to dig in an airless ditch in the summer heat. If they do share anything, it is a culture of bravery. And since I find myself wavering, eyeballing my escape — up the rickety ladder — I figure I could use a dose of that culture. We’re all brown and we are all, at least in part, New World Indians. We have that. That is where we begin.