“I stopped in plenty time,” Harry mumbled.
The supervisor just shook her head and told Harry to get back to work. Harry knew from the hard expression on the woman’s face that his days with this crew were numbered.
Sure enough, at the shape-up a few mornings later the super took Harry aside and said, “Harry, you Indians have a reputation for being good at high steel work.”
Harry’s head was thundering again. He drank as much as any two men, but he had enough pride to show up on the job no matter how bad he felt. Can’t slay monsters laying in bed, he would tell himself, forcing himself to his feet and out to work. Besides, no work, no money. And no money, no beer. No whiskey. No girls who danced on your lap or stripped off their clothes to the rhythm of synthesizer music.
Harry knew that it was the Mohawks back East who were once famous for their steelwork on skyscrapers, but he said nothing to the supervisor except, “That’s what I heard, too.”
“Must be in your blood, huh?” said the super, squinting at Harry from under her hard hat.
Harry nodded, even though it made his head feel as if some old medicine man was inside there thumping on a drum.
“I got a cousin who needs high steel workers,” the super told him. “Over in Greater Denver. He’s willing to train newbies. Interested?”
Harry shuffled his feet a little. It was really cold, this early in the morning.
“Well?” the super demanded. “You interested or not?”
“I guess I’m interested,” Harry said. It was better than getting fired outright.
As he left the construction site, with the name and number of the super’s cousin in his cold-numbed fist, he could hear a few of the other workers snickering.
“There goes old Twelvetoes.”
“He’ll need all twelve to hold onto those girders up in the wind.”
They started making bets on how soon Harry would kill himself.
But Harry became a very good high steel worker, scrambling along the steel girders that formed the skeletons of the new high-rise towers. He cut down on the drinking: Alcohol and altitude didn’t mix. He traveled from Greater Denver to Las Vegas and all the way down to Texas, where the Gulf of Mexico had swallowed up Galveston and half of Houston.
When he’d been a little boy, his great-uncle had often told Harry that he was destined to do great things. “What great things?” Harry would ask. “You’ll see,” his great-uncle would say. “You’ll know when you find it.”
“But what is it?” Harry would insist. “What great things will I do?”
Cloud Eagle replied, “Every man has his own right path, Harry. When you find yours, your life will be in harmony and you’ll achieve greatness.”
Before he left his childhood home to find his way in the world, his great-uncle gave him a totem, a tiny black carving of a spider.
“The spider has wisdom,” he told Harry. “Listen to the wisdom of the spider whenever you have a problem.”
Harry shrugged and stuffed the little piece of obsidian into the pocket of his jeans. Then he took the bus that led out of the reservation.
As a grown, hard-fisted man, Harry hardly ever thought of those silly ideas. He didn’t have time to think about them when he was working fifty, sixty, seventy stories high with nothing between him and the ground except thin air that blew in gusts strong enough to knock a man off his feet if he wasn’t careful.
He didn’t think about his great-uncle’s prophecy when he went roaring through the bars and girlie joints on the weekends. He didn’t think about anything when he got so drunk that he fell down and slept like a dead man.
But he kept the spider totem. More than once his pockets had been emptied while he slept in a drunken stupor, but no one ever took the spider from him.
And sometimes the spider did speak to him. It usually happened when he was good and drunk. In a thin, scratchy voice the spider would say, “No more drinking tonight, Harry. You’ve had enough. Sleep all through tomorrow, be ready for work on Monday.”
Most of the time he listened to the totem’s whispers. Sometimes he didn’t, and those times almost always worked out badly. Like the time in New Houston when three Japanese engineers beat the hell out of him in the alley behind the cat house. They didn’t rob him, though. And when Harry came to, in a mess of his own blood and vomit and garbage, the spider was wise enough to refrain from saying, “I told you not to get them angry.”
He bounced from job to job, always learning new tricks of the trades, never finding the true path that would bring him peace and harmony. The days blurred into an unending sameness: crawl out of bed, clamber along the girders of a new high-rise, wait for the end of the week. The nights were a blur, too: beer, booze, women he hardly ever saw more than once.
Now and then Harry wondered where he was going. “There’s more to life than this,” the spider whispered to him in his sleep. “Yeah, sure,” Harry whispered back. “But what? How do I find it?”
One night, while Harry was working on the big Atlanta Renewal Project, the high steel crew threw a going-away party for Jesse Ali, the best welder in the gang.
“So where’s Jesse going?” Harry asked a buddy, beer in hand.
The buddy took a swig of his own beer, then laughed. “He’s got a good job, Harry. Great job. It’s out of this world.” Then he laughed as if he’d made a joke.
“But where is it? Are they hiring?”
“Go ask him,” the buddy said.
Harry wormed his way through the gang clustered at the bar and finally made it to Jesse’s side.
“Gonna miss you, Jess,” he said. Shouted, actually, over the noise of the raucous crowd.
Ali smiled brightly. “Christ, Harry, that’s the longest sentence you ever said to me, man.”
Harry looked down at the steel-tipped toes of his brogans. He had never been much for conversation, and his curiosity about Jesse’s new job was butting its head against his natural reticence. But the spider in his pocket whispered, “Ask him. Don’t be afraid. Ask him.”
Harry summoned up his courage. “Where you goin’?”
Ali’s grin got wider. He pointed a long skinny finger straight up in the air.
