Deadbeat first appeared in Down & Out Magazine, and was chosen as a Distinguished Mystery Story of 2017 by Louise Penny, editor of that year’s The Best American Mystery Stories. A story of steelworkers on an unsafe construction site, inspired by the time a highrise construction crane collapsed and fell onto a Manhattan bar I was about to visit as part of a St. Patrick’s Day pub crawl. The bar owner and a kitchen worker were killed. Many other things inspired this story, but I’ll mention them at the end.
Deadbeat
by Thomas Pluck
We’re a thousand feet over the city when Chad Egekvist asks me if I’ll do him a favor. The crew is lifting the boom of the crane up the skyscraper, the most dangerous part of the job. This is when the giant steel monolith pulls itself up by its own bootstraps so we can add more girders and build higher. The bedrock of Manhattan’s good for it. But if someone’s gonna die on the job it’ll be now, and Ege is distracting me from eyeballing the rest of the crew to make sure they’re keeping safe, and it ticks me off. It’s not like we’re eating out of our lunchboxes sitting on an I-beam, like in those photos from the thirties.
I tell him not now and he gives me a look like I’m the asshole when he knows he’s the one being the asshole, and I ignore him. He’s got fifty pounds on me but I got the seniority, and if he so much as spits at my feet he’ll be working shit shifts for chump change for a year if he’s lucky. Ege knows this, and backs off. The boom goes up and locks down, and I give my crew of connectors, including Ege, the sign to go back to work positioning and riveting the beams that hold everything together.
These days I’m a foreman, but I did my time. Put in the long hours to become a journeyman ironworker, worked my way up to connector, linking I-beams until my right knee went. All that time you spend bent, sitting on the beam with your boot on the bottom rail while you rivet, it catches up to you. You favor one leg as long as you can and then the other one wears down until you got two bum knees. I got my right one replaced a ways back, but the left one’s acting up, and my kids’ school is bleeding money. So I’m still working on the bad knee, chewing oxy to keep the throbbing down, even though all I do these days is stand up here on a steel perch in the sky and make sure no one does something stupid and gets themselves killed, or worse.
Like get me killed.
The shop steward calls a break for me and my crew, and instead of climbing down to eat with the steward I join my guys on the beam. We eat sack lunches and wash them down with coffee, let the sun warm our faces, the spring breeze whip our hair, blowing away the smell of honest sweat from our Carhartt jackets. I catch a tickle of whiskey from my cousin Kari’s Thermos and flash him the eye.
I’ve been dry three years now, ever since the first knee surgery. I’d been drinking to take the edge off the pain and Dani, my wife, she watered my bottles down slow, so I hardly even noticed until I begged her to bring me a nip in my hospital bed. She told me to work through it, and I did.
The Demerol made it easy.
Lunchtime is when we bitch about the wives. Kari’s wife wants a Chevy Suburban, says she feels like she’s in a tiny can of sardines driving the minivan, squeezed between all the half-ton trucks up in Kahnawake.
Ege and Hunter and Rick think we Mohawks cover for each other, but I watch Kari closer than anybody. His father, my uncle, got me in the union. Unlike my father who wasn’t worth shit, on my mother’s side of the family all the men work high steel. They were worried I’d take after my father. Hell with that. Kari’s had drinking trouble before, but if he needs a little to maintain, keep his feet steady up here, I let it slide.
Hunter starts in next, saying how his girl loves the money from the job, but hates how he’s away so long. She looks at the diamond on her finger he bought down at Tiffany’s, wonders if she can last for the long haul with him gone months on end. My kids hate the job, too. They see me with my work bag and they hang on my arms like two buckets of rivets. Like they can keep me home. It feels like a knife in my heart. I’d die for them, and my wife knows it. She tells me I’m killing myself slowly on the beams, and she can’t wait for me to make shop steward, but I love it up in the sky.
Outsiders think we Mohawk don’t have any fear of heights, but that’s bullshit. We just don’t mind hard work and know a good thing when we see it. I remember my uncle taking me up on the roof of a three story, sitting my ass on the peak and then running to the other side in his work boots. Waving me on. His own boy, Kari’s older brother, tripped halfway and hugged those gritty shingles while he pissed his pants. Me, I ran and jumped right over him. I can still feel the tar shingles scraping the soles of my sneakers. Just seeing my uncle smiling and waving to me, it made me feel like I was somebody, not just the kid peeking over the kitchen table while the adults talked. After that, I would have walked a tightrope over hell if he asked me to.
I love my kids, but I don’t know if I could give up this life. When you walk the beams, it’s like you’re flying.
Egekvist tells us what we all know, that his wife left him after our last job on the bridge over in Bayonne and took his boys with her. “Caught me fucking around,” he shouts over the wind. “Like she wasn’t? She just had proof, and I didn’t. Judge gave her the house, and two grand a month per kid so she don’t even have to work! The brats are in school half the day, she can’t get off her fat ass and wait tables? She was working when I met her.”
“Wasn’t she the barmaid?” Kari asks. “Over at the Red Rock?”
Ege spits on the ants walking down Sixth Avenue.
All of us had been drinking at the Rock when he met her. She had a fake diamond stud below her lower lip and eyes like a shark. She worked that bar like a machine, and she worked Ege just as easy. He fell for her hard. Just like I said he would.
“Boss man told you,” Kari laughs. “He knows better’n anyone.”
They look to me.
“Ain’t killed mine yet.”
They all laugh.
It’s what I always say. My wife, she’s a good woman.
But I’ve strangled her so many times in my head that I’d probably be a world record serial killer if any of it was real. She was right, I could be shop steward if I was better with people, but give ‘em enough time, and most people rub me the wrong way. I’d never leave my children, but it’s good that I’m gone a few months out of the year.
Better for everybody.
After lunch Ege lingers. I think about leaving his ass hanging, but I’ve had plenty of foremen who were assholes just because they could be, and when I got the job, I told myself I’d never be that guy. Even when they’re half a jerk like Egekvist, they’re your responsibility. You take care of them whether you really want to or not. He wants a favor, and up here or down there, those never come free. I could use a few favors in the bank for when my left knee gets worse, and I need my guys to look the other way while I’m resting it. So I gotta be a people person, at least for five minutes.
Ege doesn’t make it easy. He looks at me, looks away, looks at me again. Like he’s made his mind up that I’m already gonna say no. And he’s pushing me that way, with this bullshit. My knee’s already aching and the oxy ain’t touching it, so I ask him, “You wanna talk?”
The wind blows his beard half over his mouth, but he’s got this shit-eating smile he can’t hide. “Wanted to ask you a favor.”
“Break’s over, so let’s hear it.”
“I’m working for nothing right now. This is worse than before I made journeyman.”
I know how much he makes, same as the rest of the crew. We’re top tier connectors, near six figures. I hear in the City that’s not big money, but where I live upstate, we do all right.
“It’s the divorce,” Ege says, and digs between his teeth with a fingernail. “Kills me, giving the bitch all my money. Now I know what you’re gonna say, she was out of my league, I was gonna pay some way or another, I told you so, all that shit.”
I don’t say anything. My wife had the same eyes. Saw me, made me hers. I didn’t have a chance.
“So my cousin’s friend’s got a job for me, framing. I ain’t done that in ten years, but he says they need another guy, their best framer’s in detox, and it’s all under the table. I can catch up, let the bitch take all my unemployment, suffer a little while, and I come back in a season or two, maybe by then she’s married that pretty boy fuck she’s with, and the judge’ll give me some air.”
I ask him what he wants from me.
“Well I don’t want to leave the union on the black list. So tell the steward I’m fucking up a little too much, because of the divorce. Not so much I need rehab. That’ll really jam me up.”
If he goes, I got to cover the slack. Maybe they’ll bring in a journeyman. I’d get more pay, but maybe my knee lasts, maybe it doesn’t.
“Ege, I feel for you, but I’m only foreman a year now.”
“So that’s how you are.” Ege smiled. “You been sitting on your ass this whole job, nursing that knee. I seen that lean before. Know who had it?”
He was talking about Garritt. The foreman I replaced. He took disability and half pay. Still in physical therapy, last I heard.
“So do me a favor, and I’ll do you one.”
“You bust my balls, you’ll never work high steel again.”
“Easy, chief. I know you all stick together, think you belong up here ’cause you worship the sky or some shit. Want me to tell the steward how you’re standing around like Pegleg Pete, not doing shit?”
I drink my coffee and it hits my belly like ice. I blow my knee out and I miss the next job. We live off savings, which ain’t much, and the medical bills bleed us dry. If I lived across the St. Lawrence River in Kahnawake like my cousin, that wouldn’t be a problem, but my wife didn’t want to leave her family, and I ran away from mine, so that’s how it is.
“Rehab’s a bitch,” I tell him. “They gotta pay for it, so they make sure you go.”
“And you collect unemployment, I know. Fuck the bitch, let her starve a little for once. I asked Kari, he said all you do in there is play board games and talk. I got it all figured out. I drink half a Thermos of vodka and pick a fight with you tomorrow, they pull me off the job. Just like when Kari went after Garritt.”
Garritt was from out west, had something against my people. I never found out what or gave much of a damn, but he pushed Kari and my cousin pushed back.
“I ain’t taking a punch in the mouth for you. Let me think on it. I’ll come up with something.”
He grinned. “You better be smarter than you look.”
“I am. My knee’s killing me, and I ain’t working the rest of your shift.”
He finishes the shift, and I chew half an oxy.
I share a studio with Kari and two other guys when we work in the City. The room’s thick with the smell of dirty boots and empty beer cans. The guys hit a strip club and I bow out, tapping my knee. But that’s not what pains me.
My old man never laid a hand on me. He didn’t have to. He taught at college, made his people proud. The girls adored him, the boys wanted to be him, dive into his bullshit poems and find meaning. He’d stay overnight and see us on weekends when he felt like it. I didn’t mind. When he was home, he looked at me like I was the worst thing alive. I had trouble reading. Mom read to me, but the words were all mixed up. Hurt my head. And my father had no patience, told me he couldn’t believe he’d made a son who couldn’t read worth a damn.
Turned to Mom and said, “If something this stupid fell out your cunt, I didn’t put it there.” Grinned to twist the knife.
We went to live with Mom’s family after that.
Because she left, we couldn’t get the house. He went on sabbatical, so he didn’t have to pay child support, and let the house go to shit. Drove all over the country writing poems about how the white man killed the earth with his steel towers. Did speaking engagements, cash only. We scraped by, living off family hand-outs, while mom busted her back scrubbing floors.
I needed a GED to go to ironworking school, and that’s when they figured out I have dyslexia. Got me a special tutor. You learn tricks, to get through it.
I went to sleep hungry, like I did all those nights on my uncle’s living room floor, while mom worked all night cleaning offices.
Down on the ground, I spot Egekvist’s shit-eating grin on the way to the elevator. I give him a nod and he meets me by the portajohns.
“You remember David Ten Eyck? After the Towers? No, you’re too young. He lost his brother, a banker up there. He took mental leave.”
“I don’t want them blacklisting me.”
“They can’t,” I say. “There’s laws.” Ten Eyck only worked bridges now. “And it’s easier than rehab. You see a head doctor, like once a week. You could work for your cousin the whole time.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. All Dave had to do was say sometimes he thought about talking a walk right off a beam. To see what his brother felt. You even joke about that, I gotta report it and they pull you. Insurance says they got to.”
Ege grinned. “I’ll say that right now.”
“No, better if you play it up. Tell the guys going up the elevator, how you’d be better off dead than alive, working so that bitch can stay home. The crew’s got to buy it. Then it’s just between you and me.” I grimace and rub my knee.
He grins at my pain. “You should talk more, guys won’t think you’re such an asshole.”
“I am an asshole,” I tell him. “That’s why I’m foreman.”
He rides up and I see the steward, tell him Egekvist’s acting hinky.
Ege is overdoing it, when I get up there. I can tell from Kari’s eyes. Before break, Hunter comes over and tells me they’ll work double time, I won’t have to cover, just take Ege down, because he’s freaking everybody out.
“I’ll talk to him.”
I climb up to Egekvist’s section and my knee burns like there’s a hot rivet rattling around inside. I sit beside him, hook my good leg around the steel.
He swings a leg side saddle, hands on his thighs, defeated. A thousand-yard mope on his face, like he’s pilled to the gills. We look out at the city, at the towers we’ve raised, the spans we’ve made.
I nod my head. Concerned. I know the guys will be watching, behind us.
“We good, Chief?” He hides his grin, but it’s in his voice.
I nod. “We good.”
I crack my elbow just below his neck. “Don’t do it!”
Break the clavicle, you can’t scream, it hurts so bad. He gulps like a fish and tumbles backward. I lunge for his boots. I overreach and hug the beam, one leg dangling, as I watch him fall.
Our eyes meet before he hits the next beam, and he cartwheels all the way down.
The boys shout, and Hunter clambers up like a spider monkey. He grabs my arm and heaves me up. We all stare, shell shocked.
“Jesus, what did he say boss?”
“Not a damn thing.”
I send a gob of spit down after him.
Deadbeat motherfucker.
One of the many things that gall me are parents who don’t support their children. When my parents divorced, my father worked off the books for his uncle so he could keep the house that my uncle helped him buy for us, and not pay child support. He later defaulted on the home, and we were never allowed to move back in, his punishment for my mother leaving his philandering, abusive, alcoholic ass. Egekvist was my favorite brand of donut when I lived in Minneapolis. Those things were like lead sinkers made of chocolate and sugar.
I love reading your stories and recognizing the familiar. Knowing without a doubt you were referring to dad, our situation growing up, the house, and his deadbeat ass. 😜 Great story. As always❤️
Holy shit Tom. Holy shit holy shit. I have vertigo from this story. Also, seconding the Louise Penny awe.