Crow's Landing (3 page)

She poured coffee and walked down the hallway.

“Travis!” she said. “Move it, dude.”

He wandered into the kitchen a few minutes later, dragging his backpack in one hand. Dusty poured cereal for him and had two slices of toast with honey for herself. She really didn't care for breakfast, but since starting work for Murphy Construction she'd dropped a couple of pounds. Her jeans fit a little looser, she knew. But then she always had trouble keeping on weight. Even in the joint, with physical activity at a minimum, she hadn't gained a pound. Maybe being pissed off was a calorie burner.

They were out the door at a quarter past seven, at which time the TV crew and reporter, apparently having exhausted all the ways to take moving pictures of an inert building, were packing up.

Dusty's truck was parked on the side street behind the apartment building. They walked around the corner, Travis with his knapsack on his back and Dusty carrying her nail gun and carpenter's apron in one hand, her lunch in the other. Her truck was an old F150, with over 300,000 showing on the odometer, a half-ton she'd bought a couple of years ago from a roofer she met on a job and had dated a few times. He had been enamored enough of her to sell her the pickup for a thousand bucks. The relationship didn't last more than a month; the truck, on the other hand, had staying power. Besides brakes and regular oil changes, she'd had no maintenance problems with it, although sometimes it wouldn't turn
over and she had to pop the hood and cross the solenoid with a screwdriver she kept wedged between the battery and the inner fender for that purpose.

This morning was one of those times. Getting out of the truck after the key failed to start it, she told Travis to slide over behind the wheel and pump the gas pedal a couple of times once she had it turning over. For Dusty, the truck not starting was a pain in the ass, but for a six-year-old, running the gas pedal was a minor adventure. She glanced at him through the windshield as she opened the hood. He was quite serious in his task, tongue clenched between his teeth, his dark brown eyes fixed on the accelerator, ready for his moment to swing into action. The instant that Dusty crossed the solenoid, he pumped the pedal and the engine started right off. He smiled at her as she got back into the truck, as he always did, a look of shared accomplishment.

They drove north on Clinton, the early traffic still light. On the street the shopkeepers were putting their trash out and the homeless were a step behind them, looking for whatever treasures they might find in the refuse. Travis watched out the window while idly playing with an Iron Man action figure in his lap. Dusty had to wonder at the scene on the street, how it appeared through his eyes.

“Iron Man can fly,” he said after a while.

“I know.” Dusty turned left on Lark Avenue, hitting the gas to make it through a yellow light.

“He's got jet propellers.”

“He does.” They were nearing the day camp now and Dusty was looking for a place to park.

“Superman can fly all by himself,” Travis said.

“That's why he's Superman.”

Travis nodded and looked up through the windshield,
toward the sky above the buildings, as if he might catch a glimpse of the Man of Steel soaring past at that very moment.

“Yup. That's why he's Superman.”

 * * *

The subdivision was on the northern edge of the town of Rensselaer and, after dropping Travis off, Dusty headed back south and took the Dunn Memorial Bridge across the Hudson River. Aside from the usual jam-up at the ramp for 787, traffic was still reasonable for the hour, and she arrived on site well before eight. It was a new project; Monday had been her first day there, and there were nearly a hundred houses to go up, along with some commercial space for minimarts and dry cleaners and whatever else might find a home in a spanking new development. Dusty parked in the mud lot across the road, beside the work trailer that sat beneath the huge Murphy Construction sign overlooking the subdivision. The job foreman was in the trailer, drinking coffee, sitting at a table that must have been twelve feet long, its surface covered with blueprints, tools, hard hats, gloves, and a lot of discarded takeout coffee cups. Dusty stepped inside the doorway.

“Anything I need to know?”

It seemed as if it took him a moment to place her. There were a lot of workers on the project—plumbers, electricians, bricklayers.

“You're framing the town houses in the cul-de-sac?”

“Yeah.”

“You're good to go. Put your hard hat on.”

She picked up a copy of the prints and spent the morning laying out the interior walls of the town houses. They were framing with wood, two-by-fours and two-by-sixes. A lot of the builders were using steel studs now but David Murphy
was a traditional type. He'd grown up in the trade—his father was a carpenter who had built barns on the prairie before moving east during the Second World War—and he stayed with the tried and true, even though it was more expensive to use wood. Dusty preferred it, too.

Shortly before noon she was nailing in lintels above the bedroom doors when Nick Santiago came on the site, noisily, puffing on his cigar, his leather coat out of place amid the dust and dirt. He pulled some blueprints from an oversize leather case and spread them out over Dusty's own set, which she had laid out on a makeshift worktable, a half sheet of plywood across two sawhorses. It was all an act on Santiago's part, as he never looked at the prints afterward. They were probably the same prints Dusty was using anyway. He removed his fedora and slapped it on the table as well, then took a couple of puffs on his stogie as he stood, spread-legged, his thumbs in his belt, casting a critical eye at the work being done. Dusty gave him a look of amused dismissal, knowing him to be a major league poser. The temperature would reach ninety by ten o'clock and Santiago shows up in a leather coat and fedora. What was he, a Bedouin?

“Looking good, people,” Santiago said.

There were a couple of tradesmen in the adjoining unit and presumably they, along with Dusty, were among the architect's “people.” Like Dusty, they didn't pay him any mind. Santiago stood savoring the fat cigar for a moment longer, as if waiting for somebody to react to his presence. When nobody did, he started for the adjacent unit, and as he passed Dusty, working the nail gun, he gave her ass a squeeze.

“Good work, sexy,” he said and kept walking.

Dusty stopped and watched him as he stepped through the studding and into the next town house, where he struck
up a conversation with an electrician who was stripping wire beside a breaker panel. After a moment Dusty turned and walked over to the table, where Santiago had moments before displayed his blueprints like Frank Lloyd Wright revealing the plans for Falling Water. She fired a half dozen nails into the brim of the architect's hat and went back to work.

Santiago stuck around for half an hour or so, playing the part as he walked from one unit to the next, and then, apparently satisfied that the minions were doing justice to his master design, returned and rolled his prints into his case and got ready to leave. Dusty had just stopped for lunch, and was passing behind him as he reached for his hat.

“What the fuck is this?” he shouted. “You nailed my new fedora to the table!”

“Touch my ass again and I'll nail it to your head,” Dusty told him and kept walking.

With the continuing heat wave, Dusty and some of the other workers ate lunch in the basement of the new project. It was cooler there, and quieter too, away from the noise of the excavators outside. Dusty sat on a piece of discarded rigid insulation and stretched her legs out, her back to the cool of the concrete wall. She was the only woman on the job site but she knew a lot of the other tradesmen, at least by sight, from other jobs and they had long ago stopped trying to shock her with their jokes and their language. Stan Meadows, a plumber, usually sat with her, and even he no longer teased her about her tattoos, or what he perceived to be her wild lifestyle. He had no idea that Dusty's life these days was as tame as a house cat's.

“What was Santiago ranting about?” he asked her when he sat down.

“Something about his hat,” Dusty said. She was eating a tuna sandwich and leafing through a real estate flyer she'd taken out of a curbside display on the street outside the day camp.

Stan unzipped the cooler bag that served as his lunch pail and produced a sodden submarine sandwich half the size of a football. Stan was in his late fifties, and maybe twenty-five pounds overweight, with thinning hair and a thick brown mustache that suggested, to Dusty anyway, a caterpillar that had somehow found itself on the plumber's face and decided to stay there. Dusty could feel Stan watching her as he bit into the messy sandwich.

“What?” she said at last.

“You're always looking at those real estate flyers,” Stan said. “How you figure to buy a house? Shit, truck you're driving isn't worth two hundred bucks.”

“Maybe I'll win the lottery,” Dusty said. “And leave my truck alone. You drive a
minivan,
Stanley.”

“You even buy lottery tickets?”

“No. They're a tax on the stupid. You buy 'em?”

“Well, yeah.”

Dusty smiled and took another bite of the sandwich. Stan missed the inference but that was typical of Stan. He was a man content in his own world and as such he had the skin of an alligator. He mounted another attack on the sub before pouring a cup of tea from his thermos. Chomping away at the bulbous mass, he smiled lasciviously at Dusty.

“You could always come live with me,” he said. “You oughta see my house. It's a showplace. Heated pool, central air. Got a wet bar.
Two
fifty-inch TVs. My house could be in a magazine. You should see it.”

Dusty shook her head. She couldn't find it in herself to be
offended by Stan. He was too normal, too middle-class-nice to pull off being a letch, even when he tried.

“How do you keep it so nice?” Dusty asked. “You know—working every day.”

“Well, between the wife and me—”

“Oh, you got a wife, Stanley?”

“Yeah.” Stan smiled. “About time I traded her in on a younger model though.”

Dusty rolled up the flyer, got to her feet, and stretched. “Then you're only going to have half a house. And half a pool. And
one
TV.” She rapped him on his balding head with the flyer. “Better stick with what you got, buddy.”

She finished all the framing on the unit that afternoon and by quitting time she was nailing furring strips above the exterior walls, using scrap pieces of two-by-fours. David Murphy came on site a half hour before it was time to quit, pulled into the lot across the road, and sat there for a time, talking on a cell phone. In spite of his wealth and his success, he still drove a truck, a Dodge crew cab, its fenders and rockers muddied from whatever other projects it had visited that day. When he got out, he was wearing his usual attire, a faded work shirt and jeans. Dusty knew he was in his seventies, but she suspected he could still swing a hammer all day if needed. He went into the trailer for a while and then came over to the units. She heard him joking with Stan the plumber. Maybe Stan was bragging about his magazine-worthy home. When Murphy walked over to where Dusty was packing up for the day, he took a quick look around at what she had done, not making a big show of inspecting her work, but inspecting it just the same.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hey.”

“How's it going?”

“Okay.” She hesitated. “Nice working with wood again.”

Murphy nodded. Dusty unplugged her nail gun and took her apron off. It was five past five, she knew—she had just checked her cell phone for the time—and she needed to pick Travis up.

“You still looking for extra work?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I bought an old three-story brownstone, the corner of Madison and Canfield. Needs to be gutted.”

“Over by the university?” Dusty asked.

“Yeah. I'm going to put in student apartments.”

“I'll do it.”

Murphy dug a key and a scrap of paper with the address on it from his shirt pocket and handed both over. “Be a Dumpster there by the weekend. Get someone to help you.”

“I can do it,” Dusty said. “Cash job?”

“You want cash?” Murphy waited a moment for her to reply, but she kept quiet. “Now you wouldn't try to cheat our good government out of their fair share of your income, would you?”

“I might.”

She thought for an instant that he might smile, or object, but he did neither. “We can make it for cash,” he said.

“Good,” she said. She gathered her lunch box and her tools and started to walk away, then she stopped without looking back at him. “Thanks,” she said.

“Dusty,” Murphy called before she made it out the door. “What happened with you and Nick Santiago today?”

“Nothing much.”

“He says you ruined a two-hundred-dollar hat.”

“Oh, that.”

Dusty turned back to Murphy, taking a moment to adjust the belt on the carpenter's apron in her hand. It seemed that he was waiting for something more by way of an explanation. But she didn't offer.

“Sometimes the world doesn't turn the way we'd like it to,” he told her. “I don't want to tell you how long I've been around, makes me feel old, but the thing is—sometimes when things don't go the way you want, you still have to act civilized. Even if it eats at you.” He waited a moment. “Okay?”

Dusty nodded. “Okay. I'll tell him.”

“Tell who?”

“Santiago,” Dusty said. “Next time he touches me, I'll tell him that it would be in his best interests to act civilized.”

She walked out. She was putting her gear in the back of the truck when he caught up with her.

“Hold on,” he said. “Are you saying he put his hand on you?”