Keyboarding, filing, and answering the damn phone.
They were easier on my sore leg than hauling pipe, gentler on my tailbone than driving a ’dozer, but they came with their own set of problems. Secretarial chores meant dressing neatly, obeying orders, and smiling till my cheeks ached.
“This ain’t no South Bay, ya know, no effin’ wonder of the world.” Harv O’Day, the site super, tried and failed to sound modest. A wiry little guy in his thirties, what he didn’t know about the Dig you could probably stick in the corner of one of his cool gray eyes. “At the Bay, they have to freeze the goddam dirt, it’s so soft, and tunneljack the highway under the railroad tracks. At South Station, the sandhogs go down a hundred and twenty feet, and they have to worry about the subway overhead, and the trains. Nothin’ like that around here.”
It was warm and stuffy in the double-wide trailer that housed the field office of Horgan Construction. The Horgans, Gerry and Liz, husband and wife, ran a local company with major political pull. They camped in the private office behind the thin wooden door to the right. I shared the central section with two desks, four filing cabinets, a chatty coworker named Marian, a Dell computer, and a ton of filed and to-be-filed paperwork. To the left, O’Day ruled an area no larger than a phone booth, watching workers punch timecards, studying specs and schedules, filling out requisition forms.
On a counter along the back wall, a microwave oven sat next to a sink. The tiny bathroom looked good compared to the outdoor Portolets.
Marian, twenty-four, cute, and curvy, had already informed me that Gerry Horgan was her dream boss, referred to his wife as “the big cheese,” and hinted that the Horgans’ only child, a “total darling,” was neglected by her workaholic mom. She’d termed O’Day a confirmed bachelor with a sniff that said she might have taken a run in that direction. She said my keyboarding skills needed improvement.
The trailer crouched in the shadow of the doomed elevated interstate, AKA the Central Artery, close to where it met Commercial Avenue. The adjacent site, Site A1520, was—according to O’Day—a relative piece of cake, a top-down job that included rerouting utilities, constructing slurry walls, cutting away the steel and concrete columns supporting the elevated highway, and replacing them with temporary supports built on top of the slurry walls. Then came tunneling between the walls, removing the dirt through openings in the roof deck called glory holes, and the actual construction of roadway and interchanges. All this underneath a major highway that had to remain open to 190,000 or so cars a day. One Dig boss compared it to performing open-heart surgery while the patient played tournament tennis.
We were near the end of the digging phase, getting ready for massive infusions of concrete—enough, O’Day said, to build a sidewalk three feet wide, four inches thick, all the way to San Francisco and back three times. The paperwork to prove it was stacked helter-skelter on my desk.
The trailer door banged and I thought, here we go again, another laborer to inspect the new talent. My first day on the job I’d worn a short skirt, provoking gazes so intent I’d been worried someone would spot my bullet-wound right through my tights. I’m not saying the traffic in and out of the trailer was all about me. By no means. First of all, everybody tramped in and out, engineers, supervisors, consultants for this, consultants for that. Second, it was damned cold outside, and third, Miss Marian Farrell, my co-gofer, dressed like a men’s mag covergirl. She also kept a box of chocolate-covered cherries nestled next to a pile of condoms in the lower left-hand drawer of her desk, and glanced in my direction more often than I liked ever since she’d found me “looking for a paper clip” in her blameless top drawer.
I’d been searching for computer passwords. A lot of people write them down, in case they forget.
O’Day headed back to his desk as the door slammed behind a man whose watery blue eyes didn’t go with his tough-guy face. He cradled his hard hat in the crook of his arm, marched over to Marian’s desk, and announced, “I wanna see Mrs. Horgan,” without so much as a glance in my direction.
“You have an appointment, Kevin? I didn’t notice you on the schedule—”
“Oh, she’ll see me, okay.”
Marian shot him a glance, and he dropped one eyelid into a wink, a good-looking guy who knew it, strolling into the trailer like he owned it. Some of the workers seemed shy indoors, scraping their boots before entering, ducking their heads like they felt too tall for the ceiling. Kevin’s boots were caked with mud.
The office door opened and Liz Horgan stepped out, smoothing a slim navy suit. The man’s eyes lit up.
She couldn’t have been much older than me, mid-thirties tops. Her oval face was the kind that looks different from different angles, her silky blonde hair long enough to yank back in a ponytail. A nitpicker might have said her lips were too full. Too many expressions played over her features too quickly for me to read them. At first I thought she was pleased to see the man named Kevin, then displeased.
All she said was, “Oh.” The sound stretched and hung in the air.
“Why don’t we—” Kevin began.
“I’m just leaving,” she said at the same time.
The inner door reopened and Gerry Horgan emerged, head down as usual, a short bull of a man, with heavy shoulders and a barrel chest. He halted at the sight of his wife and Kevin, and it suddenly seemed as if too many people were crowded into our little trailer.
Horgan was third-generation construction. Old man Horgan, builder of City Hall, was dead and his son, Leonard, builder of hospitals and office towers, was tucked away on corporate boards, confident the business was in good hands. And why not? Gerry was a double eagle, meaning he’d graduated from Boston College High and Boston College, like a lot of area movers and shakers. Liz was an architect and an engineer as well as a looker, and a full partner in Horgan Construction. The gossip mill said she owed her partnership to the feds; on a big project like this they held plum contracts open for minority and woman-owned businesses.
“Meeting’s gonna start without you, Liz.” Horgan’s voice boomed in the small space.
“I’m going, Gerry. On my way.” She patted her skirt nervously and flashed a distracted smile in my direction before hurrying out the door. It could have been aimed at Kevin, but it warmed like sunshine and I had the feeling that of all the trailer’s inmates, she was most likely to remember my name. For this job it was Carla. Carla Evans.
“Help you with something?” Horgan’s voice hadn’t lost its edge. It held Fournier in place.
“Never mind.”
“Why did you want to see Liz?”
Fournier shifted his hard hat. “Look, I heard they’re going to twenty-four/seven next door.”
“So?”
“Well, a lot of us are wondering when we’re gonna go twenty-four/seven.”
“You’ll know when I tell ya.”
“They’re saying the other guys’ll be moving on to other sites—”
“Our guys will still be working while the guys next door are sitting around with their thumbs up their asses.”
“Or maybe those guys’ll be working new sites, and when we’re ready, the new work’ll be gone.”
I noticed that Harv O’Day had left his cluttered desk and was standing behind a filing cabinet. Man moved like a cat, on springy, noiseless feet. He took two more silent steps and entered the fray.
“Hey, a guy has problems with the schedule, he goes through channels, Fournier. And I’m the channel. You talk to me when—”
“Horgan asked me—”
“And what Mr. Horgan says goes, you know that.”
“Just next door they’re going to twenty-four.”
Horgan said, “We’ll go to twenty-four when we need to. How’d it go today?”
“Today’s good. But you can’t count on weather like today.”
“You can’t count on weather, period.”
“Right, so I figure we should go twenty-four while it’s clear. I was talking to Mrs. H, and she seemed like she agreed with me, so I thought I’d—”
“Fournier, maybe you don’t hear so good.” O’Day was getting red in the face. “Look, Gerry, I’ll handle this.” He clapped Fournier on the shoulder, turned him around, and hustled the larger man out the door. Their voices trailed off, arguing but with less vigor. O’Day was going to win and he knew it.
Horgan didn’t return to his office. He stood frozen, fixed, as though he couldn’t quite remember where he was. Marian leaned on her elbow, accentuating the cleavage in her deep V, and stared up at the dream boss with big eyes. Something going on there.
Something going on, all right. The tension in the trailer was so thick I could almost grab it like a rope. I hadn’t been on the job long, but already it reminded me of other poisonous workplaces, of the squad room when reprimands were in the air, when wrong choices had been made, when a big case was going nowhere, nowhere, nowhere.
Eddie had instructed me to report, acclimatize myself, get familiar with the operation and personnel. He’d given me nothing else, not a name, not a clue as to what had caught the Inspector General’s eye.
“Gerry,” Marian said softly, “is Tess doing okay?”
“What?” Horgan sounded perplexed, as though he’d been woken abruptly.
Krissi was the neglected child, a super-smart thirteen-year-old, according to Marian. Tess was a new one on me.
“We had such a great time together,” she went on enthusiastically, not noticing Horgan’s increasing irritation. “At least, I thought—”
The dream boss cut her off. “Did I ask you to get me the specs on the finish work for the Channel tunnel?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Sure I did. Jesus, Marian, try to stay on top of things, okay? I’m sure I—Hell, hold my calls for awhile. And get me those specs ASAP.” He disappeared into the inner office.
Marian shifted her posture, bit her cherry-red lower lip. “What are you lookin’ at?” she asked me.
I hit the keyboard, but I kept wondering why Kevin Fournier really wanted to see Mrs. H. The intensity in his gaze, the catch in his voice hadn’t been provoked by any scheduling anxiety. No way.