CHURCHGOERS BY DAGOBERTO GILB

Churchgoers was first published in American Short Fiction Number 11, Fall 1993. Click on Back Issues for the complete list of American Short Fiction archives.

O.K.  That was the superintendent’s name, and it should have counted as the first warning.  Don’t men who use initials for a name always play some tougher-than-thou role?  There were a couple of other signals, too.  The waving American flag decals he put on either side of the glossy white hardhat, which seemed to have been born on his head.  Or when, the first time I got close enough to him, shoulder to shoulder on the narrow landing between sections of the metal scaffold stairs (I was on my way down, he was coming up), he didn’t seem to hear me say good morning, or care if I did. 

The hole, four stories down, was alongside Beaudry Street and gouged a city block, was tied back from Third Street on the west to Second on the east.  Not only wide, the structure would be the tallest poured-in-place concrete highrise west of the Mississippi, and so lots of tradesmen would be needed.  In the beginning, though, besides O.K., the only other Hoff-Dunbar (the general contractor) men were a journeyman named Sean, who worked with Ramirez, the assistant super, and Curt, the layout foreman.  Curt got me on.  We’d known each other from a few years earlier.  At the time, he’d been off so long – hurting – he worried about keeping up.  I was young and he was smart and we became partners, and when the job ended we shook hands, said we’d see each other again some time.  Which was this job. 

Curt had been hired by an even bigger offsite boss, and O.K. didn’t seem to have much to say to him, whereas Ramirez and Sean often took an earful of instructions which sounded more like reprimands.  Curt read and acted on the blueprints without a question, and he and I went about our business on our own.  We laid out the column footings with lime, and two backhoes cut them out.  The holes were fat, some ten-by-ten feet, six feet deep, while rough-sawn timbers, fourteen feet long and a foot square, were used as both planks to walk across and to nail the two-by-four templates the rodbusters would tie their steel rebar to.  The building being a city block, it required a lot of columns, and we kept busy.  Kicking up the dirt was always my favorite time at a job, and I liked the waul of earthmovers at the other end of the jobsite pounding the land into place here and scooping it out there, heaving up into an empty, idling rig a rich, moist soil which had gone hidden under the dirty city all this time.  Only two of the eventual three tower cranes were up, and they swung at our end in comparative silence, just like any other sky animal, pallets and stacks gliding down from the street and landing as easy as gulls onto sand. 

A crane picked the timbers and either me or Curt used hand signals to guide the operator.  We liked to set them close to our final layout, and once they were down I’d pry-bar them a few inches this way or that.  We’d been going along at it this way for a couple of weeks when one afternoon O.K., who was passing by (or whatever, since you could never be sure there wasn’t some unspoken motive), stopped near Curt.  The timber was still in midair, about eye level, when O.K. grabbed onto Curt’s end and started pushing it, hollering at me to do the same.  I’d gotten a hand on my end to walk it over toward my side of the footing hole, and I couldn’t see any purpose in O.K. screaming or working up such a sweat since the crane had it under control – what he was doing didn’t make any sense.  But O.K. kept on shoving the timber, fighting.  That was the only reason my end was difficult to keep steady.  Once it landed, my end was an inch or two from where I’d finally stake it down, while Curt’s side, now O.K.’s, was about a foot off.  I walked the timber to its midpoint and unhooked the cables, then made the slow whirling signal to the crane operator to take it away. 

Curt and O.K. were talking energetically, staring at me.  In all the jobsite noise I couldn’t hear a word, just saw their mouths moving.  I went back to my end, measured from a layout marker, and bucked the timber a half inch into place.  I swung a doublejack, driving a stake on either side like I always did, and sank a few nails to hold them together.  I was waiting until O.K.’s back was far enough in the distance to go around to the other side of the footing. 

“So what was all that about?” I asked.
 
Curt’s face was weathered brown, but it still revealed as much his youth as his age.  He never looked right wearing a hardhat and he must not have felt right either because he took it off whenever he stood still too long.  He ran his fingers through his gray hair, smiling as he shook his head.  “He said he wanted me to fire you.”

I wasn’t really surprised.  I knew I was supposed to do what O.K. wanted me to, sensible or not, and once he began yelling I was supposed to jump, fearful and obedient.  I knew about these kinds of bosses, but I never respond too well to them, and these days I’d felt more comfortable than ever because I was working alongside Curt, who did things how I believed they ought to be done—smart, I’d say.  In a way that made working a pleasure, not miserable.  We got along, we got things done right the first time.  “So that’s it, huh?  I’m cashing in today?”

Curt was combing his hair with his right hand.  “I told him we were plenty ahead of schedule, and everything was going good with no complaints I’d been told of, and if he didn’t like our work he’d have to tie a can to the both of us, because if you go, I go.”
 
I was surprised by this.  I didn’t know Curt to make speeches.  I felt as honored as I did bad for putting him in such a spot.  “Thanks,” I said, humbled.  “Nobody’s ever backed me up like that before.”

Now Curt fiddled with the plastic liner of his hardhat.  “Well, don’t be thanking me yet.  We both may be handed our checks this afternoon.”
 
“No way he can fire you,” I told him.  It had to be impractical to let Curt go—I’d been working for almost ten years, and he was the best I’d been around—but I wasn’t as sure as I pretended to be.  “And they’re getting you cheap, too.  You know more than him by a long ways.”

“Tell you what,” said Curt.  “If you’re wrong, you buy the beer tonight.”

I wasn’t wrong.  That was the last time O.K. interfered with anything we did.  I was so confident that I’d sneer and laugh when Sean would bitch about how disgusting O.K.’d get telling Ramirez and him to do something.  Curt could scarcely smile. 

For me it became the best job I’d ever had, and as more men came on—carpenters, laborers, rodbusters, plumbers, electricians, concrete finishers—it got even better.  Ramirez took off his bags, and he made Sean one of the foremen.  Curt and I kept two steps ahead on our work, which let Curt spend more time drinking coffee in a shack above the hole.  Meanwhile, I did all the one-man jobs.  I built storage boxes and ladders and sawhorses, a shed for the plumbers and ironworkers, I even built three-legged stools. And if there wasn’t something like this, or a pour to watch or a template to make, I worked wherever I wanted, and nobody questioned it—because I worked for Curt.  I loved coming to the job and I stayed any night I was asked, no hesitation.
 
After the grade slab (the bottom floor) was poured, the next weeks the columns and walls began, then not too long after that the decks, and so practically all the men who’d been pacing around and waiting above every morning were hired on.  There were hammers drumming and saws yowling, steel rebar being torched and aluminum joist being dropped; concrete fogged up the mornings, men slopping their rubber boots in that swampy mud, dragging heavy, throbbing hoses, jitterbugging and screeding.  We were building a building, and it was going up, and it was like a celebration. 

——————

Then came the changes.  First several foremen were let go, one by one, and replaced by nervous, ambitious strangers.  These new foremen fixed their sights on their new men.  They got rid of guys nobody liked, some nobody knew, and some everyone was sure didn’t deserve it.  As a downpour of men came and went, instead of a single green company hardhat, a rainbow of hats sweated it out for the bosses who wore those white ones – and especially for the man with the two flags on his.  Even Sean was fired, I learned days after the deed, because he’d had one too many words with O.K.
 
I had no personal right to complain.  I worked for Curt, and as I said, when I got done with all he had for me, I worked where I wanted.  Where I wanted to go was simple: anywhere O.K. didn’t.
 
A compliment from O.K. was when he said nothing.  Usually, though, he’d find something, and he’d narrow in on men whose work could be cussed about and put down.  Sometimes he’d throw things, sometimes he’d rip apart what they were doing and tell them to start over, and then he’d pound over to a foreman and yell in his face.  In the beginning, there were men who’d quit rather than take his bullshit, but as time passed the ones who stayed accepted the abuse, expecting the layoff check at the end of the day.  Since I was lucky enough not to be required to stick around for one of O.K.’s tirades or tantrums, I’d joke about how I could smell him coming, and I took off if I claimed to whiff the scent.  He and I, I swore, could not so much as make eye contact if I wanted to continue my employment for Hoff-Dunbar.
 
Thankfully, the possibilities for an accident like that weren’t many because of the odd jobs Curt put me on.  Like installing shelving and plywood cabinets in the electrician’s shack, what I was doing the morning I saw Mrs. O.K. and their son on a visit to the jobsite.  We were almost at street level, only a deck below, and men were stripping the column forms.  The shack I was in had screen windows, which could be seen out of easier than anyone could see in.  Mrs. O.K. was a modest, thin woman who was much younger than her husband but who dressed and groomed herself, intentionally or not, to appear older and unattractive.  She wore what I’d guess was a homemade cotton dress which was at her knees and to her neck, with gathered sleeves that covered most of her upper arms.  The boy wore nothing in style, either—ordinary running shoes, a T-shirt a little too small and faded, and off-brand, economy jeans.  His hair looked like it’d been cut in the backyard.  A few feet away from where I was, I saw proud, impressed smiles on their faces as they watched the big men below them hustling around. 

They’d been there talking happily, their hands all over the safety rails, when I spied O.K. coming around the corner of the walkway.  I decided to keep quiet—I was pretty sure he didn’t know I was inside the shack, and I didn’t want to draw any of his attention to my existence.

“What’re you doing here?” he snapped.  “Whadaya want?”  He wasn’t private with his voice.  I was sure that men below could hear him if they wanted to.
 
The boy moved closer to his mother’s skirt, and she backed up a little bit from the safety railing, too.  “We wanted to visit,” Mrs. O.K. said, disappointed, realizing she’d made a mistake.  “We came to see your building.” 

O.K. was a stocky, thick man of medium height.  His arms raised a crop of long, colorless hairs, and because of that it was hard to tell if those stumps were muscular or plump.  He had a puffy face with meaty cheeks and a bulbous, sunburned nose, its complexion about as shaded as noon glare.  Upset, he squeezed the muscles in both his arms into their bones.  It was all he could do to stand still, to maintain a respectful distance from his wife.  He hadn’t yet acknowledged his son.  “What are you doing down here anyway?” he said after a considerable silence.
 
“What I told you,” Mrs. O.K. said.  Only O.K. and I could hear her, the men below couldn’t. 

“That’s not what I’m talking about!”  Anybody could hear that, and one of the men below even looked up, worried O.K. might be yelling at him. 

Mrs. O.K. didn’t move much, and neither did the little boy.  “I had to pay that fee.  You remember.”  She didn’t reveal any emotion, but I felt her physically shrinking. 

“If you had put it in the mail on time,” he told her, "you could have saved a trip.”
 
Mrs. O.K. nodded.  More leaden silence between them.  “Do you know what time you’ll be home?”

“You know I don’t.  Why ask?”  Finally he glanced down to the boy, who still clung to the other side of his mother’s leg.  “You like my job, Bubby?” 

The little boy nodded his head slowly and fought back a smile that said he was happy his daddy recognized him.
 
“You better go,” O.K. told his wife. 

Mrs. O.K. and the boy turned and followed his quick pace toward the gate out.  A distance away, but not too far, O.K. stopped, then held a palm up, a salute which, as impersonal as it might have appeared to a passerby, nevertheless was about the nicest gesture I’d seen from him.

——————

The column crew had become the best crew because the latest foreman, Brown, was a steady, easy man who didn’t need to stroke his power, didn’t believe in using pressure tactics to get work done, and got away with it.  Because they were not only close in age but also in sentiment, Curt and Brown became lunch buddies, the result of which was that I’d gotten rotated onto Brown’s crew when the little jobs ran out and it was decided that Curt didn’t need to have a man working with him anymore.  It wasn’t long after I began setting and plumbing columns regularly that I shook hands good-bye with Curt.  Everybody knew it was O.K.’s spite, even if Curt claimed otherwise—he quit because he didn’t want to be a deck foreman.  O.K., Curt told me, didn’t show any animosity or vengefulness, and was as polite as he could be about it.  Right, I told him.  Sure.

So I took it personally for him.  It never was polite to let a man go (that was what it was; this other job was a demotion) before the job was finished.  And Curt did know that this decision was made the first week the man who’d hired him had taken a vacation.  Not that I didn’t believe Curt could find another job.  He knew what he was doing, and there always had to be work for someone like that.  It was just that sometimes there wasn’t.  And I was sure that Curt, like anybody else, would rather not have to go find some other job and company even if almost any would’ve been better than this Hoff-Dunbar one. 

We all knew our days were numbered.  At the end of each we breathed like we’d snuck something out of there.  Company man or a guy like me, O.K. had made us conscious of how precious the work we had was, how unimportant we were to the scheme of the job we were getting done.  But every day we had to tell ourselves, and often each other, to ignore it and count that money while it kept coming.
 
I didn’t like the idea of ignoring what I didn’t like.  Then again, I didn’t want to be fool enough to leave when I still wanted the work.
 
“Quitting,” my new partner Jackson advised me, “is for rich white boys.  When the boss brings you a layoff check, you say ‘Thank you very much, sir.’  Then you be on your way, not before.” 

Jackson was from Houston, Texas—that was how he said it, naming both city and state—but lived in Compton, only a few blocks from where I grew up.  He loaded up on both lithium and Thorazine, which the VA prescribed for him.  He needed drugs to calm down, he said, because he had a violent temper and lost too many jobs.  Always, he told me, squinting hard into my brown eyes, it was because he had an anger about the blue-eyed devils, especially as he was coming up in Houston, Texas.  His daddy couldn’t control him, jailers couldn’t control him, and, he confessed, whispering to me confidentially, them young men in that black militant group he belonged to for years couldn’t either.
 
“And you got to remember,” Jackson told me, “'What goes around comes around.'”

That was like some religious tenet held by construction workers.  I heard it all the time.  To me, it was a wishful rationalization for not attacking someone for doing something ugly, for doing nothing about it.  “You tell me how you’re such a mean, smart, bad old man,” I said, “so I’m thinking you must be tossing back a few above and beyond those prescriptions of yours.”

Jackson’s laugh could rouse dogs.  “You got to believe, boy!  You got to!”  He had to catch his breath.  “None of these other boys like working with old Mr. Jackson,” he said.  “How come Jackson don’t seem to bother you none?” 

“Old black men, blue-eyed devils,” I responded, “it all pays the same.”

Jackson laughed to the exclusion of all other things.  Stopped whatever he was doing, opened that big mouth, bared his stained teeth, and howled skyward.  Lots of guys, myself included, thought Jackson’s laugh was about as funny as funny could be.
 
“You better shut down that hoot, old man,” a young guy on the wall crew shouted, “or O.K.’s gonna make that black butt of yours walk.”

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Jackson hollered back.  “Won’t be the last."

In the same way I often enjoyed being around Jackson, so did this young guy, whose name on the job was Smooth.  For a few days, while we were doing some columns near a wall he was putting together, Smooth took breaks with me and Jackson, but not really to listen, even though that’s what first brought him there, instead only to talk.  Smooth told street stories.  He told them fast, speedy, and he stood the entire time, twitching around like it was happening to him right then: A car full of niggers comes by wanting to make some bad shit with Smooth, and Smooth fucks ‘em up back, tells them how he’ll give ‘em gangster knots they fuck with him in his neighborhood—he liked to repeat himself and emphasize that one word —he’ll give ‘em some gangster knots they try to fuck with him, he’ll own them motherfuckers.
 
“Maybe for a little while,” Jackson told him, “but not for always.  Ain’t no man big enough for three, and ain’t no man bigger than a well-aimed bullet.”

Smooth was a small man in his mid twenties, five eight or less, a featherweight, with prominent veins crushed between the black skin and textured muscles of his upper arms.  “I will fuck 'em up,” he warned Jackson with misplaced defiance.  “I can pop caps, too, that’s how they want it.”

That Smooth had popped some caps into another man not even a year earlier was the singular piece of biography that everyone on the job knew.  The story was that at another Hoff-Dunbar job, right after quitting time, he got into it with some stranger who pulled a gun to rob him while he was getting in his car.  Smooth, it was said, had a gun in his car, too.  And Smooth, who was hit twice in the shoulder, won the shoot-out.  Now there were also some who said the dead man wasn’t a stranger, who said it wasn’t self-defense.  Smooth, with his personality, was not an inconspicuous man, but above all, this large fact—and there were others—and the uncertainty about the details of it added at least a foot to his stature. 

Smooth had gotten on this job because the company was obligated to rehire him when he was ready to return to work, and he’d been put on the wall crew.  Ever since Sean had left as foreman, the wall crew had become the worst, every couple of weeks losing a man or two who were replaced by another one or two, including foremen.  Whether or not he was aware of it, this didn’t seem to concern Smooth.  He did his job energetically and happily, climbing up and down walers like a kid.  He talked a lot, and he talked loud, but he got the work out. 

The latest foreman looked Japanese even though his name was Langford.  He was a big man, well over six feet, and didn’t say much.  Langford didn’t yell, he didn’t get mad.  He let the men do the work after he laid it out, then he either stood off at a distance and watched without interfering, or wasn’t around.  Even when he let men go, you didn’t see him giving them their check, they just seemed to disappear. 

Jackson and I weren’t far away when we heard Smooth.
 
“What’re you looking at?” he asked. 

Smooth wasn’t trying to be loud, didn’t really seem to be raising his voice.  But it stood out.  I stopped what I was doing.  Smooth was on top of an unpoured wall, tacking a pour strip inside.  Standing about twenty feet away, a shoulder on the shady side of a cement column, was Langford.
 
Smooth stopped what he was doing.  “Don’t be looking at me,” he told Langford.   “I don’t want you looking at me.  You go look at anybody else, but don’t you come snoop around and look at me.”  Smooth spoke calmly, though I could hear him clearly from where I was, and he seemed composed, except that when he was done, when he went back to nailing, I could see he was not. 

Langford didn’t even blink. 

Then Smooth stood up at the top of the wall form.  “So you go get the fuck away from me!”  Smooth screamed this loud enough that, as big as this job was, everyone would hear him, either immediately or through an echo of gossip.  “You go get the fuck away from me, you hear, man?”

Langford heard right then, and he turned and walked off patiently, like he’d intended to anyway.

Smooth didn’t get a layoff check the afternoon after the incident, and though it didn’t seem possible form him to pull another full day, he was still with the wall crew toward the end of the next one when I heard Jackson howling near our foreman, Brown.

“That boy is crazy!” Jackson told me after their conversation. 

Jackson set free a second hoot while I waited for his explanation.  “Yes sir, he is one wild black-eyed devil.  You know, we get taught how all God’s creatures have their purpose, but sometimes it takes time for us churchgoers to see what that purpose might be so’s to come to appreciate.” 

Jackson was obviously contented by what he’d heard, and finally I had to be direct and ask what he might be talking about so I could appreciate, too. 

“Brown says they wanted to lay Smooth off, and O.K. had him a check made out, but Langford said he wasn’t fool enough to give it.  Said it wasn’t worth him dying over, said he was sure that boy was damn crazy enough to kill him.”

I didn’t know why I didn’t believe Jackson.  I though he must have misunderstood Brown or something.  But the next morning Landford didn’t show, and Jackson was grinning. 

“Laid off, like I told you.”

He hadn’t told me that part.  Or that Brown was asked to run the wall crew until they got another foreman. 

“And he won’t give him the check, either,” Jackson went on.
 
“Brown won’t?”

“Says O.K.’ll have to let him go, too.”

I might not have believed that, either, if I hadn’t been around the next day.  The entire jobsite was buzzing with snickers that were louder than Skilsaws.  The human energy was bigger than the machines’; all these men talking and whispering, working with a curious enthusiasm, their eyes open for Smooth—because Smooth had taken off his workbags.  He decided he didn’t have to drive nails anymore, only walk around the job, from one end to the other, up to the deck crew and down to the stripping crew, from wall crew to ours, strutting and talking shit, shooting off his mouth, though not about work or his situation, which he seemed to feel under control about, only about whatever else came to his mind, whatever he felt like.  When Smooth first dropped in on us, I was hooked up with a radio, acting as the rigger for the crane operator.  Like he did it all the time and every day, Smooth pulled the radio out of the leather case on my belt.  Smooth knew exactly how it worked, and pushed the talk button like he was a foreman.

“O.K., O.K., come in, please, over.”  No response after ten seconds.  “O.K., please come in please, over.”  Nothing after another wait.  “This is the smooth man, Mr. O.K., you know who, and he’s wanting to come in, over.”  Only static, but this time Smooth cut short his civility.  “Now O.K.,  you understand I’m wanting to talk with you, and I know you been listening to me.  And I’m understanding you got something for me.  Well I’m out here waiting for you to bring it.  Cuz you know I got something for you, too, O.K.  Cuz you bring something to me, and I’ll bring something to you.  You understand that, don’t you, O.K.?  This is Smooth, over for now.”

And off he took.  As the day wore on he simplified his message, reduced it to basic.  He strode up to the riggers and plucked their walkie-talkies at his whim, eventually making his voice mockingly sensual and intimate.  “This is Smooth, O.K., and I’m still waiting for you.  Cuz you got something for me, and I got something for you.”  No more over and out, no more please or come in, just straight ahead over the radio and dead into O.K.’s inner ear.
 
The whole day was a Smooth holiday.  We put in our time but didn’t care if we got anything done; we were getting paid to watch the show.  By early afternoon all the white hats disappeared for a conference with the now-unseen O.K.—the suddenly nowhere to be seen O.K. —and everybody faked it until quitting time.

By morning the next day we learned that Ramirez, the assistant superintendent, had refused to take Smooth his check, too.  Men, both awed and disturbed, started talking issues.  Top on the list was whether it was right that O.K. be killed for laying a man off.  On the bottom was the one about whether or not Smooth should get paid for this time he put in without working. 

Smooth arrived late in nonwork clothes—a long, gleaming black shirt with tails hanging loosely over his hips, no hardhat, his hair a shiny Jheri-Kurl for looking good.  His eyes were glassy, and he slowly bobbed his head when he stood still.  This morning he didn’t use the radio.  Much less cheerful than the day before, he lit a joint, and after he finished smoking it, he walked toward the parking structure ramp and went down, it was said, to the very bottom of the building, where he sat by himself and smoked more weed.
 
Brown told Jackson and me how Smooth had come into the office in the morning, right into O.K.’s den, and sat at one of the desks.  O.K. wasn’t there, but Brown and Ramirez were.  Smooth landed his feet on the desktop and asked the secretary how to dial out for long distance.  The secretary looked to Ramirez, who told her to go ahead and tell him.  Smooth dialed out.  He called his grandmother in Louisiana and talked to her for about half an hour.  Then he called his sister who lived in Palm Springs, his feet up the whole time.  Not once did he talk about what was going on, Brown said.  Only said he was using the office phone at his job. 

“Amen!”  Jackson howled out, and I laughed as hard as I could, not a second thought about it.

——————

That afternoon, an hour before we called it a day, two police officers with ties on—one of them in a blue suit, the other in a tweed sports coat and brown pants—arrived at the jobsite.  We were a few stories above ground level, and they had to climb ladders to reach the poured level most of us worked on. Then they climbed one more, to the level that was still being decked with plywood for concrete.  I didn’t know why they’d gone up there until I saw them with Smooth, grouped against a background of finished highrises and bluish, smoggy sky.  It wouldn’t have occurred to me to call these men large, but beside Smooth they appeared so—Smooth, especially from a distance, seemed so tiny.  The three of them talked on the middle of the deck while the few men around in hardhats worked, or pretended to, along the sides of it.  They conversed calmly, the detective in the sports coat keeping his hands in his pockets, looking around, probably because it was the first time he’d been on a building going up.  A few minutes passed, and they went together toward the ladder and climbed down.
 
After work a group of men, including me, wanted to stick around and recount and recount every aspect of the events, not to mention get the facts.  We chipped in for a couple of cases of beer, and sat on a section of grass near the building.  The beer freed ideas and darkened laughs.  Smooth had said this, Smooth had done that.  Once the detectives had handed Smooth the check O.K. was too terrified to give him, they has also threatened him with arrest for harassment if he even came near this jobsite again.  But nobody thought that would discourage Smooth.  The police wouldn’t live here, and Smooth knew how to drive by.  If not tomorrow, then days after.  Smooth wouldn’t forget.  Not Smooth.  And hadn’t he promised to bring something to O.K.?  He would, he’d just take him time.  He didn’t need to rush.  One way or another, Smooth had for sure killed one man they knew of, but he always hinted he’d killed others.  It wasn’t a problem for him. 

Not once had O.K. shared any time with the men he was in charge of, so we tensed up and quieted down when we saw him coming toward us.  Conditioned as I was, I was betting it was to tell us we couldn’t drink beer near the job.  Instead, he accepted a cold one.  He sat down on the grass, talking off the white hardhat with those waving flags on either side.  The skin on top of his balding head was bright pink.  Seeing him them almost made me feel sorry for him, but I still didn’t like him, so to me that head looked infected and swollen.  If I hadn’t known the real reason, I might have suggested this to explain his pained, fearful, even embarrassed slump. 

The congregation of men, just a little drunk, now sat awkwardly on the grass.  The building—a handful of laborers still wandering around, putting away tools, rolling up cords and hoses—was raising a cool, jagged shadow that inched into them.  The men weren’t speechless, but sentences faltered, words spilled like nails when a man tried to grab too many.  Finally one of the guys made a thought whole:  “You never know how crazy a person is until you try to lay him off,” he told O.K.  His intention had been to cheer O.K. up, but the sentence got away from him, opening its arms like a quote from scripture, a proverb jarring us inward.  None of us worked construction because we were rich, but neither did any let his body get this aching and exhausted and dirty only for love of money.  It was a need, and what we learned, physically and mentally, was that not just anybody could do it, not week after week, month after month, year in and out  Our job was our pride, who we were around our families and neighbors, what we spent in doctors’ and lawyers’ and dentists’ offices, what we carried camping and fishing and to ball games, what we sat back with, tired, at the bar or in an easy chair facing the tube.  It was the sex the women liked about us, the muscles our children admired.  Employed, it was what we were never ashamed of. 

And so, in that accidental moment of spiritual reflections, we all remembered how bad it was to get that check we didn’t want, the one handed to each of us more than once but especially that once when we knew we didn’t deserve it, when it wasn’t right, and how we wished the absolute worst on the man who made it so, how we prayed for an Old Testament God’s wrath and justice.  And when our eyes opened, and as they saw O.K.’s worried head turned down, they also saw another man, a friend—for me, Curt—who a week or a month or two ago loaded his heavy tools into the trunk of his car and drove away.
 
Smooth, sent by God as a lesson for O.K. about the danger of messing with a man’s working life, was a messenger for us, too.  We were all to understand the parable.  With a grinning reverence for such a happy ending, we would remember O.K., pale and scared, friendless among these men, his men, and Smooth, somewhere out there crazy, and connect them forever in our memory.  Hallelujah.  Amen. 

Re-published by permission of Dagoberto Gilb. © Copyright Dagoberto Gilb. No portion of this story may be reproduced without the author's permission.