Managing people. That’s what he concerned himself with these days. It was tricky, but he’d discovered he had an aptitude for it. He didn’t have a construction management degree like many of the kids the companies hired now. He’d come up through the ranks and he thought the men respected him for this. He knew what it was like to work for an hourly wage, to actually do the work. He was familiar with the grind. That was something you couldn’t learn in college. Case in point, here he was, after dark — his truck thermometer had read minus seventeen — making a tent around the pillars and scaffolding with lengths of plastic sheeting. The plastic would retain the heat from the forced-air propane blower. The stonemasons would get the pillar done in comfort. The walk-through would go well.
Rand dragged the heater in place, made sure the propane tank was full, gave one final look over his work, and was satisfied. He was halfway home before the pins and needles subsided in his fingers and toes. It really was brutally cold. He’d go home and make a pot of coffee, put some bourbon in it. Crank up the woodstove. Go to bed early to wake up and do it all again, Thanksgiving be damned. Like Angel had said, he was the general. He had never once expected anything out of a worker that he himself was unwilling to do. That was fairness.
—
Earlier that week, his friend Sam had invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner. He had just gotten married and was irritatingly happy. “We don’t acknowledge Thanksgiving, for obvious reasons,” Sam had said. “But Stella decided to make a big old turkey dinner on Thursday. Just a coincidence, really. We’d love to have you.” Sam was laughing and Rand could hear Stella scolding him playfully in the background. Sam’s new wife was from Lodge Grass — a member of the Crow Nation. Her maiden name was Estella Marie Stabs-on-Top. Sam was a short, pale-blond Swede from Minnesota. Stella was a long-limbed black-haired woman of the plains. After their marriage, Sam and Stella had taken each other’s names. They were now, officially, unbelievably, Sam and Stella Stabs-on-Top-Gunderson.
“It’s for the kids we’re eventually going to have,” Sam had explained. “It’s unfair, not to mention chauvinistic, to expect her to take my name. And, our kids should grow up having a fair representation of their heritage present in their name. I mean, Gunderson is only half of the story here.”
—
When he got to the site in the morning, they were already there, their radio blasting mariachi out into the snow-laden pines. It was the kind of brittle temperature that froze the mucus at the corners of your eyes, made your nose hairs prickle, made you cough if you breathed in too deep. Rand got the coffee going in the trailer and did some paperwork. Once, he looked up from his desk to see a string of elk emerging from the edge of the timber. They looked patchy and miserable, their caution lost to the cold, moving aimlessly for warmth.
At noon Rand bundled up and went out to check on the crew. He brought a case of Miller High Life. A peace offering. Angel nodded at him when he ducked under the tarp. Rand saw that they were making good progress.
“Warm enough in here?” he shouted over the radio.
Angel gave him a thumbs-up.
“I brought you some Thanksgiving beer.” Rand set the beer on a bucket.
Angel gave him a double thumbs-up.
“Okay. Good work, guys. I appreciate it, Angel. I’m going to take off. Make sure the propane is unhooked when you leave.”
Angel nodded and shouted, “Okay!” His crew had barely looked at Rand. He wasn’t sure how much English they understood, although it had always been his experience that they understood more than they let on.
—
Rand went to dinner at the Stabs-on-Top-Gunderson’s and had a good time. He felt a little guilty about leaving work early, but he had been caught up on his progress reports and would have just been sitting there twiddling his thumbs anyway.
When they sat down to eat, Stella said, “For the record, I have no problem with Thanksgiving.” She pointed her fork at Sam. “Who could argue with a holiday based on giving thanks for what you have?”
Sam shrugged. “I’m going to eat the hell out of this turkey, but I just want everyone to know that is no way indicative of me endorsing this gluttonous festival of oppression.”
They ate and drank too much, and then all pitched in on the dishes. Rand watched Stella and Sam as they bantered and snapped each other with dishtowels and talked about their unborn children as if they were not so much possibilities as certainties that just hadn’t happened yet.
Rand rarely wasted too much time thinking about women. He’d spent enough years on construction jobs to know that this put him in the minority among men. There was a Korean massage parlor in Billings that he visited once a month. The women there were probably closer to fifty than forty, but he didn’t mind. They were good-natured, motherly almost. He tipped well and, if they didn’t have another customer right away, sometimes he stayed and had a cup of roasted barley boricha with them. Occasionally, he fixed things around the place that needed attention. He hadn’t had a serious girlfriend in ten years.
After dinner, Rand returned to his empty house. Everything was in its place, and if it wasn’t, it was because he was the one who had misplaced it. That was comfort. The woodstove was casting its glow in the living room and he made himself a whiskey and sat in his recliner. He switched on the TV and watched some sports highlights. He didn’t think his life lacked for much of anything, at least there were no holes that couldn’t be filled by getting a dog. Last spring, his old lab Charlie had gone to chase the big tennis ball in the sky. He thought enough time had passed now and maybe he’d go look at the shelter sometime soon.
—
The day after Thanksgiving, he got to the job site early. He figured he’d be the first one there and do a walk around to see what was what before any of the crews showed up. He was somewhat surprised to see Angel’s truck in the parking lot. It had snowed a bit overnight, just a couple powdery inches, but it was enough to cover the tire tracks in the parking lot. No one had come or gone this morning. He couldn’t figure out why Angel’s rig was there. It just didn’t make sense, really.
There were no tracks to the Porta John, to the lift, to the pallets of stone — no tracks of any kind. A white blanket of snow. Complete quiet, until a jay shrieked in the pines. Rand was out of the truck now, walking fast and then slowing, stopping. There was a dark shape pushing against the semi-opaque plastic around the pillars where Angel’s crew had been working. When he got closer, he could see that the shape had a face. Rand wanted to turn, run, get into the truck and drive, but he forced his feet to move, kicking through the snow. He ducked under the plastic. It was cold. The propane tank must have run empty.
They were all there, three men slumped on the scaffolding, and Angel, sitting, back against the stone pillar, eyes closed as if he were taking a nap. Rand knew immediately. It was impossible to mistake it for anything else.
It was carbon monoxide, they told him. Somehow the heater exhaust had been covered by the tarp, filling the area the men were working in with deadly fumes.
Two of the men — Angel’s cousins — had been illegal after all.
—
There was a delay in the construction, while the situation got sorted out. But then, sooner than seemed decent, they were back at it. A new crew came in to finish the stonework. The carpenters and electricians wrapped up the interior. And, not long after the first of the year, Rand’s trailer got hauled away and the whole affair was complete.