Callan Wink - Dog Run Moon

Official company policy was that he needed a copy of a driver’s license from any laborer on his job site. Some of the licenses they came in with looked like they’d been printed off at Kinko’s. Rand would laugh and shake his head on the way to the copy machine. The guys would leave the trailer grateful. A man who was appreciative of his job made the best worker. Rand had figured that out a long time ago. And, everyone knew that the Mexicans were the best bricklayers around. Theirs was a country whose history could be sketched out in the transition from stacked stone to adobe brick to rebar-enforced concrete block.

The weather that fall had been unusually bad — a foot of snow on the ground on Halloween day. By Thanksgiving, they were over a week behind schedule. It was a residential job, a huge stone-and-timber ski chalet — style house in the Yellowstone Club Ski Resort development complex. The owner was some sort of tech genius. He’d made a fortune creating apps. Rand was peripherally aware of what an app was. The guy wanted to be in the house by New Year’s, in time for his annual ski vacation. The place had a private lift line running up the mountain from the garage. Rand was pushing, paying out more overtime than he would have liked. Then Thanksgiving hit. The thought of the project being stalled for one whole day at this stage set his teeth on edge. Angel’s crew was in the process of building the large stone pillars that offset the main entrance, one of the final touches to be completed on the home’s exterior. He was supposed to give the owner’s representative a walk-through soon. If they could get the pillars done, Rand thought that the whole endeavor would have a more finished feel, despite the fact that the interior was still a mess of raw walls and floors and wires spewing from the Sheetrock.

On Thursday, none of the other guys were going to be working. If there was one thing Rand had learned in his years on job sites it was that you couldn’t fuck with Thanksgiving. There was the holy trinity of football, food, and booze to contend with. The electricians and plumbers and finish carpenters had knocked it off early on Wednesday afternoon. It was bitterly cold and supposed to only get worse. The next day was forecasted to reach zero degrees for a high. Rand sat in the job trailer all afternoon looking out the window at the house, those damn unfinished pillars. Angel and his crew had the stone worked up about halfway but there were at least two more full days of work to be done.

The more Rand sat and looked at the pillars, the more he knew they needed to be completed before the walk-through. He went out to talk to Angel.

—

The masons were gathering their tools. Their big diesel was already running in the parking lot. The sky over the Spanish Peaks was going a washed-out pastel pink. He stood under the scaffolding, hands jammed into his pockets, waiting for Angel to finish what he was doing and climb down.

Mexicans didn’t celebrate Thanksgiving anyway. He figured it wouldn’t be a big deal — that they’d want to work. They always wanted to work.

As it turned out, they didn’t want to work.

“I already told my guys to take the day off,” Angel said. “Sorry.”

Rand sighed and spit into the snow. “Shit, man. I was really hoping you would be able to make some headway on this thing tomorrow.”

Angel shrugged. “Gonna be too cold anyway. We should have heaters as it is. The mud isn’t setting up right.”

“I’d consider it a big favor if you’d come in tomorrow. I’ve got a walk-through coming up. These pillars. If they’re done the whole thing looks more done, you know what I mean?”

Angel shrugged again, he was gathering an extension cord, wrapping it in loose coils around his arm from hand to elbow. “Sorry, man. The guys already have plans. No one else is working anyway, right?”

“I’ll be here.”

Angel smiled. He was missing a canine, and Rand could see the pink mollusk of his tongue through the gap. “But, you’re the boss,” he said. “No days off for the general.”

“Okay,” Rand said. “Sure.” He kicked a little at a chunk of snow. “I understand.” He started to walk away and then stopped. He cleared his throat. “Hey,” he said. “There’s another thing that has recently come to my attention. Now, I just want to say that this is coming from the higher-ups, my boss, you know? I’m getting some pressure to verify that everyone on my job site is legal. I’m not implying anything. I’m just saying it could be an issue. Get me?”

Angel was still smiling. “I was born in San Antonio,” he said, squinting a little.

“Sure. I know that.” Rand nodded toward Angel’s crew, up on the scaffolding gathering their tools. “I don’t know about them, though. And, up until this point, it hasn’t mattered. I’m just saying that might change.”

Angel nodded slowly. “And if we come in to work tomorrow?”

“I don’t foresee any problems. Can I count on you?”

Angel’s smile tightened. “Heaters,” he said.

“I’ll get them set up tonight, personally.”

Angel shouted up to his men, and Rand headed back to his trailer. He didn’t understand what Angel was saying but he could tell his crew was unhappy. There was rapid-fire Spanish, grumbling. One of them threw a shovel down from the scaffolding and it hit an overturned metal mortar trough. There was a hollow boom that echoed once, and then was swallowed up by the cold. It would be dark soon. An inversion cloud was forming over the distant peaks, a pewter sheet turned down over the sky.

—

When everyone had left, Rand bundled up and pointed his truck so the headlights were on the house. He felt bad about coming at Angel that way, but that was sometimes the way things had to go. Years ago Rand had thought that getting into the building trades would be a simple, straightforward, honorable profession. You made things with your hands, and at the end of the day you had hard physical evidence of your effort. You wouldn’t get rich but you slept well — sore muscles and a clear conscience, that sort of thing. That might have been true in the beginning. When he was a journeyman carpenter swinging his hammer for a paycheck things had been much easier. But, as it happened, he’d been good at his work, and he’d advanced.

He hadn’t done any serious shovel work or walked joists in years. He wasn’t complaining — he owned his own home, he had a fishing boat and his truck was paid for — it was just, now, at the end of a day, he had a harder time determining what it was exactly he’d done.

Managing people. That’s what he concerned himself with these days. It was tricky, but he’d discovered he had an aptitude for it. He didn’t have a construction management degree like many of the kids the companies hired now. He’d come up through the ranks and he thought the men respected him for this. He knew what it was like to work for an hourly wage, to actually do the work. He was familiar with the grind. That was something you couldn’t learn in college. Case in point, here he was, after dark — his truck thermometer had read minus seventeen — making a tent around the pillars and scaffolding with lengths of plastic sheeting. The plastic would retain the heat from the forced-air propane blower. The stonemasons would get the pillar done in comfort. The walk-through would go well.

Rand dragged the heater in place, made sure the propane tank was full, gave one final look over his work, and was satisfied. He was halfway home before the pins and needles subsided in his fingers and toes. It really was brutally cold. He’d go home and make a pot of coffee, put some bourbon in it. Crank up the woodstove. Go to bed early to wake up and do it all again, Thanksgiving be damned. Like Angel had said, he was the general. He had never once expected anything out of a worker that he himself was unwilling to do. That was fairness.