Sometimes one of the workers puts a finger on one nostril and blows a stream of snot to the ground, and a businessman is disgusted and curls his upper lip, but the workers move on, indifferent, through the morning rush hour.
Clarence Nathan’s new tan construction boots have already been worn so much that rings of hair have been rubbed away where the leather uppers touch his legs. A talisman of sorts. A charm. His blue T-shirt clings tight to his torso. In the wallet in his back pocket he carries his grandfather, his dead mother, his wife, and his three-year-old daughter. His hair has fallen out of the Afro that Dancesca gave him, become long and straight once more. Up above, if he raises his head, a skeleton of his own creation rises toward a cloudless Manhattan sky. Some of his fellow workers will remain at the foot of the building, slinging chokers; others will hang clips to ropes and lean out dangerously over the middle section of steel; others will reside all day in its corridors, fixing elevator shafts, twisting electric wires, grouting, hammering, painting, sheet-rocking. But Clarence Nathan will go higher than any other walking man in Manhattan.
After coffee in the shanty, he joins the ironworkers at the elevator and they rise, aristocratic, in the air. Fourteen men, two teams of seven. The cage rocks in the wind. There are no glass panes, just bars across their knees, hips, chests. Beneath him, Manhattan becomes a blur of moving yellow taxis and dark silhouettes. There is something in this rising akin to desire, the gentle rock from side to side, the cooling breeze, the knowledge that he is the one who will pierce the virginity of space where the steel hits the sky.
All Clarence Nathan’s colleagues are sinewy. A couple of them are Mohawks, their blood distributed in such a way that it is balanced in all parts of their bodies: it comes from their history, it is a gift, they have pure equilibrium, the idea of falling is anathema to them. Others are from the West Indies and Grenada, and there is one Englishman, Cricket, who serves his vowels as if holding them out on a set of tongs. He is thin and blond and pockmarked and wears a lightning-bolt earring. Cricket was given his nickname for trying to teach the other workers his native game while standing at the top of a crossbeam. After shining an imaginary ball at his crotch, he put his head down, ran along the narrow beam to display the technique of bowling, making his arm spin in a giant circle. His watchers sat and stared as Cricket almost fell — there was thirty feet of space beneath him to metal decking — but he caught himself by the strength of his arms, dangled, grinned, pulled himself up, and said, “Leg before wicket, gentlemen!”
The elevator clangs and stops. Clarence Nathan finishes his coffee, tosses the paper cup, and walks across the metal decking toward two ladders that jut up in the air. For a joke the men call this area the POST, the Place of Shriveled Testicles. No ordinary man will go further.
The nimblest — Clarence Nathan and Cricket — take the ladder two rungs at a time. Their leather belts are filled with tools, and their long spud wrenches knock against their thighs. They climb three ladders to the very top of the building, where columns of steel reach up into the air. The foreman, Lafayette, in thick-rimmed spectacles, pokes his head up from the top of the ladder and says, “Another day, another dollar.”
Careful with how he steps, Lafayette walks across the loose decking. Cricket goes with him, saying, “Another day, another dolor.”
Clarence Nathan remembers his mental maps of yesterday: where certain pieces of equipment were left, where the holes in the decking might be, where on the roof he might accidentally kick over a bucket of bolts, where a can of beer might have been discarded at the end of the last shift. Radios crackle and voices babble over the airwaves. The men watch the huge yellow Favco cranes swing into action, bringing up beams and columns of steel. The metal is inched through the air. When the steel is laid on the decking, Lafayette decides in what order the men will build. The ironworkers wait and chat.
The quietest among them is Clarence Nathan. He says hardly a word, but sometimes, when the foreman is not around, he and Cricket challenge each other to walk blind across the beams. They move as if on solid ground. If they fall they will not go far, but thirty feet are as deadly as one hundred. Eyes closed, they never miss a beat.
On the decking, Clarence Nathan turns his hardhat backward, tucks his hair underneath. The signalman speaks in a language of coded radio signals to the engineer in the crane. A huge steel column is hoisted; the men jostle the column into position, and then it gets bolted in at the bottom. The column jags up against the sky. The crane swings a jib line with a spherical ball on the end of it — the men call it the headache ball. Lafayette whistles for a man, and Clarence Nathan gives him a thumbs-up. The line comes toward him.
He reaches out to grab the cable, steadies it, and, with superb insouciance, steps onto the small steel ball.
Suddenly the jib line moves and he is swinging in the air, in nothingness. He adores this feeling: alone, on steel, above the city, his colleagues below him, nothing on his mind but this swing through the air. He holds on with just one hand. The engineer in the crane is careful and brings him slowly up toward the top of the column. The headache ball swings slightly, then stops. Clarence Nathan shifts his weight and moves lightly out onto the thick steel flanges of the column — for one single second he is absolutely free of everything; it is the purest moment, just him and the air. He wraps his legs around the column. On the opposite column, Cricket is waiting. Then the Favco swings a giant steel beam toward them and it inches through the sky, carefully, methodically, and both men reach out and grab it and bring it toward them. “All right?” shouts Cricket. “Okay!” They wrestle the beam into position with brute strength, sometimes using large rubber hammers or their spud wrenches to knock it into place. The sweat rolls quickly down their torsos. They insert bolts and turn them loosely; the bolter-uppers will crimp them tight later on. And then the men unhook the chokers — the beam now sits between the two columns, and the skeleton of the building is growing. Clarence Nathan and Cricket walk along the beam and meet each other in the center. They step off into space and onto the headache ball, arms around each other, and descend to the decking, where the others wait. Sometimes, for a joke, Clarence Nathan takes out his harmonica at the top of the column and blows into it, using just one hand. The wind carries most of the tune away, but occasionally the notes filter down to the ironworkers below. The notes sound billowy and strained, and for this the men sometimes call him Treefrog, a name he doesn’t much care for.
“All right!” Treefrog says, when he and Angela reach the end of the first beam.
Angela is breathing hard. Even in her fur coat he can see her chest rising and falling. “No way in hell you gonna get me up there!”
“It’s simple.”
“Get me down. You just wanna knock. You just like all the rest. I don’t feel good, Treefy. Oh. Treefy.”
“It just looks higher than it is, that’s all.”
“I want my shoes.”
“Just imagine you’re on the ground.”
“Well, I ain’t.”
“If you think you’re on the ground it’s easy-peasy.”
“I ain’t a child,” she says, as she wipes a stream of blood onto her fur coat.
“I never said you were.”
“I’m staying here. Get me my shoes.”
“They’re down there, goddammit.”
“I ain’t leaving till I get my shoes.”
“All right, then, stay here.”
“Don’t leave me, Treefy. Please.”
“Just watch me.”
He places his hand in the hold that he has chipped from the column and, within seconds, he is up on the second catwalk. Five feet below him, Angela still has her arms around the concrete column as if she’s bandaged there. Treefrog wraps one leg around the beam and leans down and takes her hand and — close to violence — he swings Angela through the air and grabs her at the waist and tugs her up. He expected her to shout and scream and kick, but all she says is, “Thanks, Treefy.”