She touched the intricate gold pin on her blouse. “I’m pinned. My fiancé is coming out from Iowa tomorrow for a week.”
“Pinned?”
“When a man gives a sorority girl his fraternity pin, they’re sort of unofficially engaged. We’ll be married after I graduate from the U of Iowa next June.”
“Oh.” Dunc was forlorn. “Notre Dame doesn’t have frats.”
She shook his hand. “They’re waiting for me, Dunc.”
Only after Uncle Carl’s car had pulled away did he realize that, feature for feature, she’d been the beautiful twenty-year-old in his Minneapolis dream who’d told him to face the killer.
Now she was gone and he didn’t know how to reach her. And even if he did, the girl of his dreams was pinned.
It was Thursday, their fourth day on the job at the San Fernando Mission some twenty-five miles north of Los Angeles, erecting three long two-story seminary buildings in a U-shape around a courtyard out behind the mission plaza. They were hod carriers on a cement crew, doing prefab work before the pours.
The other hod carriers were two Negroes and seven Mexicans. Osvaldo, who spoke English, brought the other Latins each morning in a rusty, rattling pickup, took them away at night.
“Dunc! Gus!” Mike Donovan was the crew supervisor, a red-faced Irishman with a beer drinker’s gut and pale bloodshot eyes. “Help Samuel and Joshua with those goddamn forms.”
Samuel was about thirty, good-looking, light-skinned, blocky and muscular, with thick, shapely arms shown off by a blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off. He had a habit of smoothing his heavy mustache with the side of his finger.
Those goddamn forms were sheets of plywood that contained and shaped the liquid cement in the monolithic pours — so called because each new layer was bonded to the layer below.
Samuel told Dunc, “We wet down the inside of the forms. Then we grout ’em.” Grout was hand-mixed liquid cement liberally splashed into the forms and over the rebar to bond them with the poured cement. “Then the cement crew itself makes the pour.”
Joshua was older, maybe thirty-five, India ink to Samuel’s milk chocolate, long and lanky and slightly stooped, with huge hands and long arms banded by stringy muscles of great strength. He wore Can’t-Bust-’Em coveralls, and his normal splayfooted gait was a slow shuffle.
“Ain’t got me but one speed — supreme low. But watch out when I’s coming through.”
At lunch break Dunc wolfed down Aunt Pearl’s sandwiches, then cut across the old-style Spanish-mission compound to the small fully restored red-tiled church. He knelt in a back pew with the rosary he’d bought for the penance given him by the Las Vegas priest. Thursday. The Joyful Mysteries. Perfect. He felt pretty much joyful right now, where he should be, when he should be. Of course Penny was pinned by somebody else, but...
Gus slid into the pew next to him, oblivious to the burning sacristy light that marked the Sacred Presence in the tabernacle behind the altar. “Get a look at those walls — seven feet thick at the bottom, five feet thick at the top. Built to last.”
Native designs of bright primary colors covered them. “Who did the artwork?” whispered a resigned Dunc. “Indians?”
“Originally, yeah. These are just copies.”
At quitting time Dunc drove them south through Sepulveda’s endless traffic toward Los Angeles, inching them into the smog, eyes smarting, thinking of Penny. Gus broke in on his thoughts.
“Birdie wants me to spend the whole weekend with her.”
“Congratulations,” said Dunc. “I’m going to Muscle Beach on Saturday, I’ll drop you off.”
On Friday morning they were on top of the wall pounding nails into forms. Dunc paused to wipe the sweat off his face; he noticed Osvaldo going into the portable latrine just as a blue sedan followed by a closed van raced up the dirt track to the seminary site. Two men in suits and two in uniform jumped out.
Mike Donovan cupped his hands to yell up at them.
“Dunc! Gus! Down here on the double.”
The Mexican members of the cement crew were being herded into a van by the uniforms. Osvaldo started from the latrine, saw this, stepped back in quickly, and gently closed the door.
A blocky man with lank reddish hair and a jaw like a sledgehammer walked over to Dunc and Gus. He had quick eyes set too close together. His thick neck bulged over his collar.
“Where were you boys born?”
“Rochester, Minnesota, but what business is it—”
“You?”
“Springfield, Illinois,” said Gus. “What’s this about?”
“Routine.” He went back to the sedan, got in beside the driver. The van was pulling out. Donovan raised his voice.
“Okay. Back to work. We’re gonna be shorthanded ’til Monday, everybody’s gotta pick up some slack.”
Back up on the forms, Dunc asked Samuel, “What’s going on?”
But it was lanky slow-moving Joshua who answered.
“Immigration and Naturalization. Those guys was illegals, they got busted. They’s on their way back to Mexico right now.”
Dunc felt outrage. “Why didn’t Osvaldo get grabbed?”
“He’s got his green card. Happen every two weeks, steady as clockwork.”
At the lunch break Dunc tried again at the chapel. Friday. The Sorrowful Mysteries. The Agony in the Garden while the Disciples slept — the bewildered faces of the Mexicans being taken before they got their pay, while he and Gus just watched. It put the day’s events under a spotlight. That priest had known what he was doing. You may not recognize the opportunity, but you’ll say, “This is it!” and you’ll do it.
Was this the chance he had meant? And if it was, what could Dunc do about it?
Half an hour before quitting time Donovan gave them their first week’s paychecks: $100 less withholds! A lot of money.
“Remember, you gotta cash ’em with the hod carriers’ union.”
The union’s office was a California-style bungalow in a tract so new half the houses weren’t finished yet, some of them not even framed. No landscaping, no lawns, no plantings. A two-by-four sheet of half-inch plywood leaned against the wall beside the open front door with big black letters painted on it: HOD CARRIERS LOCAL #2784.
In the middle of the living room was a battered hardwood table. On the table was a dark green money box, a stamp pad and rubber date stamp, a stack of gray-covered booklets about the size of bankbooks, and a pair of meaty elbows.
The elbows belonged to a swag-gutted man with the sleeves of a white dress shirt rolled up over thick forearms. His face, unsoftened by the cigar that graced it, looked as if it had been used for batting practice a long time ago.
The room’s only other furnishings were a couch and another straight-back chair, each holding a carbon copy of the deskman, equally blue of chin and flat of eye. The deskman snapped impatient fingers.
“Paychecks.” He threw them back, disgusted. “Endorsed.” As they endorsed, he wrote each man’s name in a booklet off the stack. “Your membership books. We keep ’em here for youse guys so’s they won’t get lost.” He used the rubber stamp on the first page of each booklet. “Fifteen bucks a week dues.”
He carefully counted out greenbacks into two equal piles, then extracted two twenties and a ten from each pile.
“We gotta take out your onetime initiation fee for bein’ let into the local.”
“Fifty bucks?” demanded Dunc, outraged.
“Local’s gotta lotta expenses.”
“Yeah, a table, a couch, and two chairs.”
“Union rules. You don’t like ’em, there’s plenty of guys want your jobs. You’re gettin’ top dollar here.”