The Walking People (37 page)

Michael knew that despite the brave face she wore, Greta had been feeling unmoored since Lily's death, and to have lost her job the same day and for such a silly reason, and for weeks after to have had to face Julia's endless questions about why they didn't go to the funeral, why Aunt Johanna had not returned to California, why Greta didn't seem to miss her brothers—all of it had quieted Greta in a way Michael had never seen before. He suggested to Greta a few weeks after Lily died that telling Julia might make her feel better. He'd brought up the possibility many times before, but this was the first time he'd pushed the matter, made it clear that telling Julia felt to him like the right thing to do. Not just for Julia, but for all of them. To Michael, the details surrounding Julia's birth seemed insignificant compared with the work Greta had put in since then. And not only the work, but the love as well. Julia would see that, surely. Dermot Ward always said that too many secrets would turn a woman old before her time. Men, yes, they could handle secrets, but a woman with a secret was a woman turned inside out. And she missed Johanna. That much Michael knew without being told. She missed Lily, of course, but she missed Johanna more. She either rushed to the mailbox when the mail came, or she made sure not to rush to it. In the first few weeks after Lily died, she picked up the phone and returned it to its cradle half a dozen times a day, and even now, so many years later, he still caught her at it now and again, looking at the silent phone, then picking it up to look at the lit up numbers.

There had been no calls from Ireland since Lily's funeral. No letters. Nothing. Nine years, and still nothing. Right away Michael had felt a finality about the silence that he was afraid to point out to Greta, and then he realized that the silence might have started on Greta's side of the ocean. Maybe over in Ballyroan they were also looking out for the postman. He urged her to tell Julia their secret, shine a little light on that cobwebbed old news. But Greta had lashed out at the suggestion, thrown it up in his face that he wasn't the one who had to worry. No one was out there threatening to say he wasn't Julia's father.

"But I am her father," he'd made the mistake of saying, and then had to watch as Greta's eyes swam beneath her glasses and two fat tears slid down. He saw that she was smart. He saw it long before she
and he and Johanna had left as a threesome for America. She'd taught him to read and write, after all. She'd figured out how to raise a baby. She'd always found steady work. Yes, she was smart, but still, once in a great while Michael saw that thing in her that they used to talk about in Ballyroan. That quality of being apart from other people, of veering left when everyone else veered right. Not to be rebellious, like Johanna might have been, not marching in the opposite direction with defiance, but simply wandering away without noticing there was another choice.

God loves a doer, the first Julia Ward used to say. And Greta was a doer. She tried. Lord, did she try. When she cooked dinner for them, she was either so careful not to burn it that they ate everything nearly raw, or she was so careful to cook everything through that it all came out burned. And at Eavan and James's school, Michael could see some flicker pass through the teachers' faces when they saw her coming. Amusement, maybe. Harmless enough, Michael supposed, as long as they answered the questions she asked. How do I help them at home? What kinds of things should I do? When they show me their homework and their figures are wrong, am I supposed to correct it or make them figure it out? What if I don't know the answer myself?

God only knows how Julia turned out so smart. With her, they were so green they didn't even know there were questions to ask.

In the late 1970s, all of these feelings were carried along the drafts of the apartment like seaweed on the ocean. And when the tunnel work started up again, finally, after twenty-six months, things finally began to feel as if they would return to normal. The silence from Ireland continued. Michael stopped nudging Greta to let the secret out. Life went on.

 

But here they were again, 1986, another big layoff on the horizon, not much smarter now despite having been through it before. Julia was almost through with college—just three weeks until graduation—and at almost twenty-two she, at least, was old enough to fend for herself. As for the others, Michael tried not to think about it. Eavan was nine and James was seven, and every week they seemed to need something new — clothes, sneakers, books for school, ten dollars for teacher,
twelve dollars for a class trip, money to buy a gift for someone's birthday party. He didn't remember Julia ever needing so much.

Michael went along with the others who said they had seen the layoff coming for ages, but privately he was surprised. Mayor Koch—who'd been all for the construction of water tunnel number 3, who'd put on a yellow rain slicker and a hard hat and stepped into the mud-caked and rusted cage and descended seven hundred feet under the sidewalk, who'd beamed out from his seat on the roofed railcar below as if he were admiring purple mountain majesties instead of soggy walls of mud, who'd hopped off the train three miles down the track to run his hand along the weeping rock face where the tunnel ended, who'd clapped his palm on the broad backs of the workers and told them the end result of all their labor would be as important as the Panama Canal — could lately be seen on television talking about the federal tax bill and what cuts would mean for public works in New York City.

"Public works," one of the West Indians said in the hoghouse on a Monday afternoon just before the start of the three o'clock shift. "That means water tunnels."

One of the Irish corrected him. "It means apartments for the blacks."

"No. It means everything that gets money from the city," another said.

"Including tunnels," Malcolm, one of the Haitians added, and the rest shrugged. If it was going to happen, it was going to happen. All they could do was keep working until it did. Almost sixty years old, Malcolm was the oldest sandhog on the job and had worked the oil refineries of New Orleans, the shipyards of Baltimore, and, for the past sixteen years, the tunnels underneath New York City. Once, years earlier, Malcolm had saved Michael's life. There was an electrical fire down in the tunnel, and Michael had never seen smoke so black or a fire that moved so fast. Some men dropped their tools and ran down the narrow mile of tunnel that stretched north. Three men who'd been on break ran down the tunnel that pointed south, only a hundred feet long at that point, and were chased by the toxic smoke, eventually cornered by it. Michael, who'd been standing closest to the two huge power boxes when the fire was sparked, started to run south just like
the men nearest to him, but he felt himself being tugged back, knocked to his stomach, pushed facedown into the murky five inches of water that were always present at the bottom of the shaft.

"Let it pass over your head," a voice said, and Michael looked over to find Malcolm drawing a long breath and plunging his face into the muddy water. Just that morning, as they were pulling on their boots, Malcolm had said to Michael, "I hear the Irish say tinker. It means black?"

By the time they'd lifted their faces from the water and pushed themselves onto hands and knees to begin the long crawl to the cage, one man was dead and another had inhaled so much smoke that he'd never work again. As Michael stopped crawling to tear off his shirt and tie it around his face, he decided that if he made it to the top, he'd find another job, something at street level. Even above street level would be better — the men who did the repairs on the George Washington Bridge, suspended high above the glittering Hudson, only had to fall through air if something went wrong. If Michael was going to die on the job, at least he would do it out in the open, not crushed under a thousand tons of rock and dirt or smothered by air that couldn't be recycled fast enough. Six more months, he decided as he and Malcolm crawled onto the lift. That was 1981.

 

As Michael tried to stuff the cuffs of his jeans down inside his boots, he listened to the other men on his shift discuss the possibility of a layoff. At least a layoff would shut them up about a strike. He'd been through one strike already, six long weeks of sitting at home while the powers that be held out for some detail of a pension plan that Michael could hardly see had the slightest thing to do with most of them, retirement being as distant and as impossible to imagine as picking the numbers of the New York Lotto. At least in a layoff you weren't refusing good work that was sitting there waiting for you.

The bell that signaled the ten-minute warning rang out, and Michael's friend Ned Powers hung back as the rest of the men filed out of the hoghouse and made their way to the cage that would lower them underground in groups of five. Michael noted the stubble on Ned's face, the way he kept rubbing it roughly with the palm of his hand, up
and down, as if he'd already worked his shift and was trying to scrub himself clean.

"What'll happen?" Ned asked as he waited for Michael to hang his street clothes in his locker. Ned, like the rest of the men, stuffed his good clothes in as if it were a hamper.

"Don't know," Michael said. "Wait and see, I guess."

"But what'll we do if it does happen?" Ned asked. "I can't sit around like last time, not knowing."

"We can shape for day labor doing something else. The odd day might get us through. Might only last a month or two."

"You must be fucking joking," Ned said, striding ahead of Michael through the rows of hoghouse lockers and pushing on the bar of the heavy fire door. Michael patted his back pocket for the third time, confirmed his flashlight and folded ruler. They'd be measuring and laying down fuses that day. Greta always said that Ned Powers was typical Irish. He drank big. He talked big. He claimed to know everything there was to know about building tunnels, or building anything for that matter. He'd seen it all. He'd done it all. He told lies a mile long.

He was not typical Irish, however, in his attitude toward Michael. He didn't care whether Michael was raised by the side of the road or on a raft floating in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Michael worked hard, and that's all Ned cared about. Plus, Michael didn't go in for a lot of the Catholic stuff like the rest of the Irish. Sure, the others might talk rough once in a while, but that didn't prove a thing. They bowed their heads on Sundays just like they'd been taught. They fingered their rosaries and prayed on the inhaled as well as the exhaled breath. Michael didn't participate in the rough talk, but not for any religious reasons. For Ned, it was enough that a man
was
Catholic; he didn't have to believe on top of it. For Michael, it was clear that Ned would have fitted in nicely at Dermot Ward's campfire. He might have been the only country person Dermot invited in.

"I'll go home is what I'll do," Ned said as they walked side by side across the lot to the check-in board, and Michael got the sense, as he often did when it came to Ned, that he'd be having the same conversation with himself even if he didn't have an audience. In this respect Ned was like all the Irish Michael had ever met in New York City;
they all claimed they were just six months or a year away from going home. Some men had been in America for thirty years and still, when they spoke of the future, it was always set in Ireland.

Ned was rambling on. "I'll get a construction company going at home. Modern houses. Modern plumbing. We could have it up and going in no time."

"We?" Michael smiled. There was no sense pointing out to Ned that a business building houses meant there had to be people willing and able to buy the houses that were built. There was also no sense in reminding Ned for the millionth time that Michael had no intention of going home. Besides, he and Greta had just had an offer accepted on a house thirty minutes upstate, a fact Ned knew perfectly well. The closing would be scheduled any day.

"I know, I know," Ned said. "Well listen, there are rumors about a project in Boston. Something huge. Something to do with the highways. They'll need sandhogs if they're digging under the river. They're doing the planning now, and construction might start any day."

"You'd rather wait around in Boston than wait around in New York?"

"Christ, Michael. What are we going to do?" Ned asked, angrier this time.

"Take it easy," Michael said, under his breath now that they were getting closer to the men waiting for the cage to come back up for another trip. There was only one way down to the tunnel, and most of the sandhogs were already below. The three men waiting were engineers, and Michael knew better than to mix Ned with the engineers if he was already in a mood.

"We'll wait," Michael said when the cage came to a stop and the rusted gate swung open.

"Already three oh two," one of the engineers pointed out, looking at his watch. Michael stepped slightly in front of Ned, his right shoulder overlapping Ned's left. If Ned made any kind of stupid move, Michael would block him, have him on the ground before the engineers knew what had happened.

In silence, he and Ned watched the engineers arrange themselves
inside the narrow cage so that their shoulders wouldn't bump on the way down.

"Three oh three," the same man said, smirking, just before the cage dropped and they disappeared from view. "You wouldn't want to get docked."

Ned's chest puffed out and his broad hands became fists. "Fucking cunts," he shouted down the shaft.

"Jesus, Ned. Are you drunk?" Michael asked, taking hold of the back of his friend's shirt and pulling him away from the mouth of the shaft. All at once Michael took in the slackness in his friend's face, the volume at which he'd been speaking all afternoon, the smell, barely detectible but there, definitely, even over the primal smell of blasted-out rubble and muck, eighty tons of it so far that day, waiting in a container at the edge of the site to be transferred to a landfill in New Jersey. Each afternoon, Michael's first whiff of this dirt, so recently excavated from the bowels of New York City but so deep it was untouched by the city, reminded him of home. There are six kinds of dirt, Dermot Ward used to say. Easy, hard, dry, damp, clean, and dirty. The mountain at the edge of the site mixed all of them, plus, Michael guessed, some types Dermot didn't know about, never having spent time underground.