Not All That White

Photo by Esther Lee

Everyone on the raising gang notices when the journeyman connector, Joseph Bogoslavsky, reaches into his fifty-pound leather tool belt for four massive bolts and then sinks them, one by one, into the steel corner beams, his toes balancing on a two-inch ledge ninety-four floors above the street.

But no one sees him dive headfirst into thirteen hundred feet of open gray mist, his legs trailing behind him like loose streamers.

The crane operator, Butch Barlow, who had the best view of the site, contended months later in a sworn legal deposition that yes, he had seen Bogoslavsky connecting the beams, but then Butch had to look the other way to guide another eight-ton beam down to the deck under the direction of the lead connector—"Tuck, uh, what's his name, you know, the big Indian guy. I was having a little problem with this Tuck guy," Butch said, "on account of attitude and him signaling me I was coming in too fast, so I slowed it and laid that sucker down real gentle, like it was a feather on a baby's ass. When I look over my shoulder, this Bogo guy was gone, so help me God."

One other journeyman and a punk trainee were standing on the opposite side of the ninety-fourth floor releasing the choker from steel that the crane operator had just delivered. But the concrete elevator tower obstructed their view of Bogoslavsky, everyone agreed.

So that left only one other person who might have seen something, namely, the lead connector of the raising gang himself, Tuck Beaumont. The same Tuck who had been signaling to Butch to slow the boom down and whose back had been turned to Bogoslavsky. "I never saw nothing," Tuck said.

Tuck is six foot three, straight-backed, with skin the color of strong breakfast tea. He's got a broad chest and powerful arms sculpted by thirty-five years' experience in ironwork. He reaches for a steel beam come twirling at him from the crane, matches up the beam holes with the awl end of his spud wrench, slides in bolts from a leather tool belt at his hip, then sits back a moment dangling his legs in the free ether a thousand feet above the city. He walks the high steel with his hands on his hips, whistling, like it's Sunday in the park. He's been a Team Leader and lead connector ironworker for over twenty years. A journeyman connector for fifteen before that. If he's got any faults, his men don't know them. His hair, mostly dark but with wide streaks the color of the fog that drifted in that morning, reaches long down his back in a single, unbraided tail that is bound tight with two leather straps in a crisscross design. That is, it would if he did not tuck it all beneath the regulation hard hat.

So that's how he got his name, Tuck. Don't ask him his real name, because you cannot pronounce it. Ask him where he is from, he will tell you, "I am Kannien'keha:ka, from the sovereign Nation you call the Mohawks. We are the Kannien'keha:ka, the People of the Stone you call flint."

Tuck told the truth when he said he did not see Bogoslavsky depart the beam: that is, the truth as he saw it. Tuck had been signaling that jerk Butch, thinks he is a damn cowboy swinging it down so fast, but Tuck was clear in his sworn legal statement that the crane operator did eventually slow it down real nice, so there was no way the oncoming beam had caused Bogo's fall.

Ever since that day, Tuck has thought that possibly he felt something on the beam behind him just moments before. The slightest, most subtle vibration, the tiniest sound. Not the bright sound of metal on metal but the smudge of something softer on metal, like cloth or leather. And...