Nobody says anything. Then Bulldog slaps his thighs and stands up. But that’s how it goes, he says, and he tells everybody to get a move on, it’s time to paint a bridge.
* * *
At lunch, Baby is looking through the paper. He tells Gomer and C.B. and the rest of them how he hates the way they keep numbering jumpers. She was the 995th, and he wished they’d stop doing that. And when they’re reeling in the scaffold for afternoon break, he turns to Whale and tells him — without Whale’s asking — that the worst thing about it was that he was the last person, the last living human being she saw before she died, and he couldn’t even remember what she looked like, and he didn’t need that, he really didn’t.
And that’s when Baby loses his noise helmet. It slips out from the crook of his arm, hits the scaffold railing, and lobs over the side. It being a clear day, they both follow the helmet all the way down, not saying anything, just leaning out and watching it, squinting their eyes from the sun reflecting off the surface of the bay, and hearing it fall, the cowl fluttering and snapping behind the headpiece, until the helmet hits with a loud, sharp crack, like a gunshot. Not the sound of something hitting water at all.
At break, Baby’s pretty upset. But Bulldog tells him not to sweat it, the first helmet’s free. Yeah, Red says, but after that it costs you, and Red should know, having lost three helmets in his nineteen years. But Baby can’t shut up about it. He goes on about the sound it made when it hit the water, about how amazing it is that from 220 feet up you can single out one fucking sound. He’s worked up now. His voice is cracking, his face is redder than usual. They all look at him, then at each other, and Bulldog sits him down while the rest of them go out to work. Baby tells him he’s sorry about the helmet, he really is, and that it won’t happen again. And that’s when Bulldog tells him to go on home. Go home, he says, and kiss your wife. Take the rest of the day, Bulldog says, I’ll clear it with the Bridge Captain, no sweat.
* * *
Everybody’s suiting up for morning shift. It’s a cold one today, with the only heat coming from the work lights strung across a low beam overhead. They climb quickly into long johns and wool shirts and sweaters and parkas. They drink their coffee, fingers of steam rising from open thermoses, curling up past the lights. They wolf down doughnuts that Red brought. Whale is picking through the box, looking for an old-fashioned glazed, and C.B. is complaining to Red why he never gets those frosted sprinkled ones anymore, when Baby, who hasn’t said a word since coming back, asks nobody in particular if he could maybe get a new nickname.
The painters all look at each other. Tradition says you don’t change the nickname of a painter on the bridge. You just never do that. But on the other hand, it seems important to the boy, and sometimes you have to accommodate the members of your crew because that’s what keeps a paint crew together. They watch him sitting there, concentrating on re-lacing his boots, tying and untying them, saying, It’s no big deal, really, it’s just that I never liked the name you gave me, and I was just wondering.
So they take these few minutes before the morning shift to weigh this decision. Whale chews slowly on the last old-fashioned glazed. Bulldog pours himself another half cup, and C.B. and Red both sit hunched over, coiling and uncoiling safety line. Gomer tips his chair back, dances it on its rear legs, and stares up past the work lights. The boy clears his throat, then falls silent. He watches Gomer rocking back and forth. He follows his gaze upward. Squinting past the lights, peering into the dark, he listens to the gusts outside whistling through the tower above them.
Hunger Tales
So they did eat, and were well filled: for he gave them their own desire …
I.
She went grocery shopping three times a week, after aerobics class, stopping at a market that was on her route from the fitness center to her apartment. It was a tiny family-owned place, with a splintered wood floor and two checkout stands, dimly lit and narrow-aisled and very popular with urban professionals. They carried microbrews and power bars and arugula, plus all the staples. So when she needed bread, bananas, carrots, milk — the usual things — she stopped there.
But when she felt she deserved a treat, then a special trip — a cookie run — was in order. For such trips she preferred to go to the biggest supermarkets she could find, places that employed so many checkers and rotated them so frequently that she could never become a regular to any of them. She always went late at night, when there were fewer people. And she liked to make the rounds, to zero in on the cookie aisle by switchbacking up and down all the other aisles, from one end of the store to the other. She did not linger on the perimeters of a supermarket. Seafood and Meat, Bakery, Produce, Deli, Dairy — these areas did not sustain her interest at all. The aisles drew her, and specifically, a particular effect of her passage through them: with each turn she took, a gallery of foods unfolded before her, glutting her field of view in a visual engorgement that made her skin tingle and her innards twitch and pucker, a kind of pre-cookie jitters that never failed to arouse her in an unsettlingly erotic way. The cookies would be gone fifteen minutes after she got them home — sooner if she opened the package in the car and started in on them while driving. Afterward, she would lie groggy on the sofa in front of the TV, sugar levels plunging, euphoria slipping away, feeling bloated and guilty and alone until she nodded off to sleep.
One night she drove to her favorite spot, a twenty-four-hour mega-market located at a mall just past the airport. It was the newly opened flagship store of a regional chain. It had twenty-six aisles, an all-night pharmacy and café, a video store, and a lounge with sofas and reading lamps and a fireplace with imitation logs burning in it. She scooped up a handbasket just inside the automatic doors, skirted the lounge, and headed directly for aisle 1A. These could be long nights for her. She could browse for hours, reveling not just in the sheer quantity of products but in their ever-expanding variety: there were ice creams with chocolate-covered pretzels or fudge brownie chunks or real vanilla bean specks in them, and made with organic strawberries or kosher cream or nuts not grown in a rain forest; there were white, yellow, blue, and red corn tortilla chips, and brown-, black-, green-, and orange-colored pastas; there were breakfast cereals shaped like peanuts, like raspberries, like doughnuts and cinnamon rolls, like waffles, like tiny slices of French toast; there were fifteen kinds of pasta sauce, ten flavors of rice cakes, and a dozen different flavors of carbonated water; there were eight varieties of something as simple as mustard. She felt immersed in abundance, gliding along like a love-drunk paramour, idly tossing items into her handbasket: brown sugar from aisle 2A, a can of sliced peaches from 7B, a box of raisins from 9B. At the end of the evening she would return most of these selections to their shelves, retaining only one or two benign items as counterbalance to the cookies. She never bought just the cookies. Nobody, she felt, needed to know that much about her.
But tonight, something was wrong. Although it was well past midnight, the supermarket was crowded. She had to squeeze past double-parked carts and around clusters of chatty shoppers blocking her path. Other late-night browsers began to loiter annoyingly on the periphery of her own late-night browsing. They sidled up next to her, perusing the same shelves she was perusing, their hands reaching for the jam jar next to the jam jar she had her hand on. One fellow trailed her all the way down the cereal aisle — inadvertently, she was sure — but persistently enough to compel her to move on. And worse, there were employees everywhere. They were crawling all over the place in their clip-on bow ties and starched blue aprons with name tags on them, briskly restocking shelves, trucking out head-high pallets of more boxed goods and taking box cutters to them with the panache of sushi chefs. They kept asking her if she needed help finding anything, and she kept saying “No, thank you.” She felt so rushed and prodded, so frustrated at losing the rhythm of the evening, that she curtailed her usual route. She skipped aisles 12 through 21 and headed directly for 22B, the bull’s-eye of her desire’s meandering arrow — Cookies and Crackers. Once there, she never varied in her selection — it was always either the Nabisco Chunky Chips Ahoy or the Keebler Chocolate Lovers’ Chips Deluxe. Yet she liked to mull over this choice, to savor the pretense of having to decide between one cookie or the other from the panoply before her: Which of you comes home with me tonight?