the guy that fell from the sky

THE GUY THAT FELL FROM THE SKY












“It’s your story. You can tell it anyway you want to.”
Sam, Ironworker, Local 184













Chapter 1

The Powerhouse, Local 184, Spring 1974

When he came to the hospital, there was no movement at all of the lower extremities and of the right upper extremity, except very minimal movement.
Dr. Blume, neurosurgeon


The 750 Norton was good to me that day, firing on the first kick. The ride to the Powerhouse was uneventful ‘cept losing my thermos. While Count—what the yard foreman started calling me upon my return—had wired it down carefully, the metal cylinder vibrated loose and skittered off into the ditch of the new roadway that looped like a half-crescent around the outskirts of the city.
“Goddamn it, why didn’t I get that sonovabitch on there right!”
I stopped the old metallic-blue motorcycle on the new shoulder and retrieved the now-dented steel thermos. I missed the Ironworker bus piloted by Tom Stevens, steward on the job—and maybe a cold one with the boys on the way home. The short white school bus took the crew of carpenters and Ironworkers and a few laborers to the Powerhouse leaving the El Char at 6:30 on the dot--I didn’t have much time to spare. The motorcycle, I reckoned, would get me there faster.
“I ain’t getting’ a fuckin’ thing done right!”
Anger rose like the fog. It billowed out over a flat green horizon near the river, not far from empty little league ball diamonds where a nightly invasion of gnats and mosquitoes competed for attention.
Siouxland motorists turned craned their necks and peered out large windows. Traffic tempo had increased as I neared the bridge. Like a harmless advertisement, the stop was but a little puff of interest with which they could fan themselves as they plowed through a river bottom of time on the borders of the small, flat Midwestern city.
For all they knew, it could be their judgement day.
“I mi’z well just go it alone.” I straddled the cycle and pointed the Norton Commando south on I-29, thinking how son Jeremy now slept soundly an ocean of land away. This was a new thought. It joined the cast of many new thoughts—but nothing much about it could I do.
“One damn thing after another,” I muttered, righting the motorcycle, kicking back the stand. Listening to the muted rumble, I shifted down then throttled hard. I jumped into lines of traffic funneling to the bridge that crossed a deep and dark brown river and deposited us to another state
The unplanned stop replaced a state of early morning bliss, a silent commune with nature. Like most days, it’d been a pretty drive up Highway 35. Silver drops of dew hugged green cornstalks with a misty embrace. Milkers went to barns with empty buckets; they’d come back moments later full and white. Couldn’t a guy smell the green and taste the white as I punched the motorcycle down the two-lane highway?
In the far distance, rising above gray mist over the Missouri River, stood the tall smokestack of Unit 3 Port Neal Powerhouse. When I first started a year ago, hopes and aspirations for my young family, for my dream of finishing school, had all been locked up in workin’ iron at the Powerhouse. It was hope, a temporal salvation, a chance to finally get away from a small farm town and its aging neighbor farm towns. These towns—along a dusty graveled road near a railroad or a channeled river near a packing house--that dotted the Northeast Nebraska landscape like a handmade quilt is where I’d grown up; it’s where I desperately wanted to leave. With ironwork at the Powerhouse, there’d be enough money to break away, get back to college, writing ambitions realized.
Had I not wheeled my last barrel of concrete, pounded my last form pin, started up, pull started a small cement mixer?
These dreams were not unrealistic, despite the fact I’d never applied to the college with the famous writer’s workshop. It didn’t matter; it was all yet possible. A little luck, a little hard work. Just a few more weeks beneath the sun, back to the wind, walkin’ the high iron, that’s all she’d take.
Yet luck on this roll of the dice ran out. Day after Father’s Day, not three months on the job, I got a Judgement Day of my own. Off the iron I’d gone, yanked by tension from a hose that connected to the rattle gun. Catching the whip from the hose--journeymen said I didn’t let go of the gun—got pulled off the iron. Suddenly, I was in free fall, going down, red iron breaking my body, breaking my fall. Ironworkers who’d just opened their thermos and lunch pails for the 10 a.m. coffee break watched helplessly as I bounced my way to the smooth wet sand.
“I saw the whole thing,” said Junior Hughes, my foreman on the bolt-up gang, pointing upward to the red iron skeleton puncturing a blue cloudless sky. “A guy was feedin’ ya the hose and I don’t know; for some reason he let go. You got pulled backwards and landed on a scaffold. Before we could get over to ya, ya rolled off. You went down twenty feet and hit that I-beam so hard looked like it’d break a guy in two. Then, rolled offa that, hit your head on a stairway, landed on the sand. I think ya hit maybe four or five things on the way down,” Junior said, eyes widening. “It didn’t look like you’d ever make it.”
The peace of mid-morning coffee was shattered—a man’d fallen off the iron.
“You fell right in front of Frank Smith’s feet. He was packing sand,” Ironworker Kevin Monahan related. “He ran to the shack and yelled, ‘We got a man in the hole, call the ambulance.’ The first ambulance wouldn’t start. Then we gotcha on the second one. Then it got stuck in the sand ‘cause it’d rained the night before. You shoulda seen those Ironworkers push that thing—they almost carried that motherfucker outta there,” Monahan said, shaking his head.
“Tom Stevens and the Big Indian rode the ambulance to the hospital. They said they ran out of oxygen before they got there.”
My dad said, “I remember exactly where I was that day. It’d rained the night before and had flooded down at the Eighty. I was working on the water by the barn and Jim Erickson came driving up and said ‘Ronnie’s fallen off the iron at the Powerhouse.’”
Mom added, “We called the hospital emergency and made sure you had a priest. Then we went right in. Dr. Fee said your pupils were dilated and there was no pulse.”
Monahan continued. “Then we just walked off the job. They were fucked havin’ you guys do that.” He turned and spat. “I was workin’ by the precipitator when they said somebody went in the hole. I wasn’t more than 50 feet from where you went off. We didn’t think you’d make it. If ya did make it, you’d be a vegetable.”
“I think we had three deaths total on Unit 3, didn’t we?” Junior said. “One guy was killed before you fell and two guys after.” He added, “I never liked goin’ up but you, you were like a monkey up there. Nobody could keep up with ya. You were always one step ahead of everybody.”

After the sixty-five foot fall, things changed. Instead of applying for college, I applied for Workmen’s Comp. Instead of high caliber authors to peruse then discuss over beers at a pub in Iowa City, I had to learn how to read.
For every action there’s a reaction. Life in the little green house on the corner spun out of control. Like an Angus bull crashing through the chute—if you don’t get the headgate down, there’s no way you’re gonna stop him.
Grandpa DL always said, “Don’t look back.” But now I looked back—often. It was like watching a very bad dream I couldn’t wake from—now being wheeled or driven around like I was an invalid.
“Yeah, it’s great to be alive and be a miracle,” I said to Kerry rolling to her arms, a day after dismissal. “But honey,” I felt like crying but couldn’t, “I can’t read anything I wrote.”
“You just havta keep going to therapy, Ronnie. At least you can walk. They didn’t think you’d be able to walk.”
“Yeah, how would you feel? I can’t even cum anymore. We need to see Dr. Fee.”
“Yeah,” Kerry said, pulling her light brown hair back from her eyes, “maybe we could go in and see him.”
Young, dumb and full of cum, the ironworker motto. Well now, I certainly had the first two. I didn’t realize how much I’d counted on the third.
“Well, that’s what happens usually after a head injury and all the surgery,” Dr. Fee said, looking down on me kindly. “You had two major operations in less than 24 hours. Everything will probably be all right.”
Yet, brain damage wasn’t a yoke I gracefully wore. Years ago, a kid from town hauling gas for his dad’s filling station didn’t see a black locomotive whistling through tall cornfields—the train smashed the red gas truck, pushing it a quarter-mile down the road. Jerry, 20 years later, hitchhiked up and down Highway 35, from one small town to the next. When you picked him up, swinging an extended right hand in a slow arc, Jerry never remembered that maybe you picked him up the day before, that you had a small conversation, that maybe you looked at the white scar on his scalp. Jerry always talked about his dad’s Super H Farmall tractor.
Then he’d ask and ever querying “What’s 999 x 999?” When you of course you didn’t have the answer, Jerry grinned. He explained how this calculation was derived. “See,” Jerry would say, turning his blank blue eyes “you just multiply 1000 times a 1000 and then subtract one.” It was in a slow drawl that swam forever in some small channel in his brain, like a fish in a tank. A wide grin beneath thick glasses filled a face that never aged. An old dark cap hid partially the scar across a large scalp. Like my Grandpa used to say, “There goes Jerry comin’ back.”
“I’ve seen Jerry up and down on the highway as long as I can remember,” I thought. “Never thought somethin’ like that’d happen to me.” Jerry was also the butt of not a few jokes, filling the local bar with idle humor. Jerry walked stiffly, awkwardly, favoring his right leg. My mom said my right side was also weak. “Doctor Fee told me and your dad and Kerry there was a good chance your right arm and your right leg might be paralyzed, you might be in a wheelchair the rest of your life. You just don’t know how far you’ve come.”
Maybe I was out of the hospital and out of the wheelchair but I felt weak: I couldn’t read. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t remember. And, as a hot dry summer rolled into a brilliant fall, our young family, despite all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, couldn’t be put back together. I hated the way I looked: the burr hole, the tracheotomy I was sure everyone noticed. Speech and physical therapy continued but it was little use. I lashed out at Kerry, hating what I’d now become.
Fold did the green house of cards.
One minute Kerry and Jeremy were there in the green house on corner, the next minute they weren’t. Day after Father’s Day I fell; two days after Thanksgiving they were gone.
From thereafter, I loathed holidays.
Early Sunday evening of Thanksgiving Day weekend I woke to voices and light movement in another room. From the bedroom, I stepped dumbly into a bright kitchen. There was Kerry holding Jeremy, Kerry’s brother Dave and buddy Tim. She was near the door—our three-year-old pressed against her shoulder. His straight dark hair touched the top of her ears.
“I’m just going to go away for a couple days, Ronnie,” she said reassuringly to his waking figure, light brown hair down to the shoulders of a worn tan coat. “I’m going to stay with Mom.” Dave and Tim stood in the middle of the kitchen, their coats still on.
“What?” I said; the haze from a late morning drunk didn’t lift. Dying to get back to my former state of grace, I’d ignored warnings not to drink. “But why?”
“I just need a little time away.”
She turned her head to me and licked her lips. She pushed back a strand of hair from her eye. Her lips moved a little and were tight against her teeth. “I had Dave come out and get me.”
“Well, okay.” I rubbed my eyes. The fumes of the morning drunk were now in my mouth; my lips felt dry and chalky. I thirst.
The guests and Kerry and Jeremy all had their coats on, not far from the back door of the old green house on the corner that now seemed to sag a little beneath the weight.
“But what about Jeremy?” I couldn’t think. My head was exploding. I needed a drink. “You don’t need to take him. I can watch him okay. I jis’ started drivin’ again and can get around.”
I watched my young pretty wife move to the door, three-year-old Jeremy hooded and pressed against her shoulder. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said, pulling her hair away from her eyes. “I’ll only be gone a couple days.” She hitched Jeremy up a little higher on her hip. She looked at the door and made a movement.
“I just need a little time away, Ronnie,” she repeated.
I was comforted by the sound of her voice. “Oh, well, okay.” Still groggy, I couldn’t put up much of a fight.
The park scene in the neighboring town that afternoon--it was ugly. I saw how she looked at all the guys getting ready to play touch football, a smile creasing her lips. I felt weak and helpless. Couldn’t drive, couldn’t walk, couldn’t read, couldn’t write. I felt awkward, out of place. Self-conscious, my hair—shaved for the operation—had yet to cover the scar across the back of his head. My tracheotomy a blotched bright red, surrounded by puffy white skin. I hated to feel weak. I hated the way people now treated me—like I really wasn’t all there, like I was a vegetable.
Would I hitch Highway 35, hitch through the small towns that dotted the landscape?
Suddenly, I became enraged. Drunk, I tore sunglasses from her smiling face.
“How dare you call my dad and have him come to the house. I wasn’t going to do nothin’!”
“Don’t hurt me, Ronnie,” Kerry said, frightened. She looked at me like I was some strange beast. “I’m sorry. Don’t hurt me.”
“Let’s go home. I’m sick of this shit.”
Jeremy began to cry. He was scared. They were all scared. They all wanted to cry.
Now what could I do? I’d attacked her in the park suddenly, unprovoked. Didn’t I have it coming?
Kerry and Jeremy’s “short time away,” however, was not entirely true. Days stretched to weeks, then a couple months. Six months later, she stepped into California. I realized later that, like the early explorers, the western expedition with a young child was stopped only by the ocean, so firm was her commitment to start over, husband or no. After all, wasn’t there someone waiting in the wings? For that matter, for a pretty girl, isn’t someone always waiting?
She’d stood patiently over her recovering husband for six weeks in intensive care. Never left the hospital. Drove every him every day to therapy. Wasn’t that penance enough?
And, while recovery was amazing, the split widened. While I got past the alphabet, Kerry grew more determined. Marlene, speech therapist, noted the progress.
“You’ll be reading, soon,” she said, smiling and looking up at me from her braces. Marlene was a quadriplegic. I learned to trust her. Our small makeshift classroom was a table and two chairs in a small room in a wing of the hospital. “You’re learning fast.”
Marlene agreed with mom; how far he’d advanced in such a short time.
“You’re doing so well,” Mom said. “You don’t know how far you’ve come. Your hair’s coming in much thicker.”
Sis Katy, who cleaned our house and babysat Jeremy on a moment’s notice, tried also to cheer me up. “Danny was sitting there explaining what all those tubes were—you were just full of tubes—where this one went and where that one went; and I just fainted.
“Mom always said if you can’t handle it when you go in to see Ronnie, then don’t go. You’ve come so far.”
Yet, I didn’t think recovery was near fast enough. Nor would it get me back to where how I once was. While maybe I was gaining slowly, I was losing by leaps and bounds. Marlene, too, felt badly I was now making the journey alone.
Kerry and Jeremy lengthened their stay at her parent’s. Kerry’s mom said, when I first came to town 24-hours later, imploring their return, how she “felt sorry” for me. From the doors of a modest blue split-level, the missus looked down at me with sorrow and contempt.
No, they were not coming back. Not now, maybe not ever.
How I hated waking up alone! How I loathed to drive home to a dark household—phone or radio or TV or, later, maybe a can of beer. There was no Jeremy there to run to me, nobody to take on a ride to the farm, nobody to sit down with and have supper, the hills darkening, a few streetlights coming on.
The holiday season was a few weeks away. Should I buy a Christmas tree? Should I buy presents and put them under the tree? It was all pretty useless.
Meanwhile, Kerry got a lawyer. After a visit with the new Catholic priest in the church where we were married—Father felt her stance justified and granted walking absolution. She turned then to legal channels.
The splinter was now a tear.
Perhaps there was yet a chance, I thought, driving down Highway 35 early evening, a few Christmas lights on the city’s busy streets. Maybe the Church would step in.
“She was pale and shaking,” Rev. Kresnick said, soon after we sat down in his study. The middle-aged priest pointed to where I should sit—beneath a picture of the crucified Christ. I had followed in Kerry’s steps and went to see St. Mike’s assistant parish priest. It was the church where they’d been married on a bright May day.
Unlike before, however, when I entered the ranch-style rectory, it was sans warmth, sans greetings. “Come in, come in. Let’s go over here.” It was my first meeting with the pastor—I’d never seen him before. I sensed the discussion would be different from what I’d imagined.
Ashamed of my outburst at the park the weeks before, I timidly began to explain the nuclear family’s present plight. “Well, Father, we went to the bar after church and there was a bunch of ironworkers there and I had a couple beers…” but Father Kresnick cut me off. It was the celibate’s business to intercede--a marital account must be rendered.
“She says there’s been abuse.”
I knew it was coming. I lowered my head. I studied my shoes. I thought of how I had run into the Ironworkers at the bar, out to the small town Sunday morning to hunt pheasant and quail in the nearby hills. They guys were out to hunt. I hadn’t seen my brothers since the accident.
“How you doin’?” they’d all said. “It didn’t look like you were gonna make it. We thought for sure you’d be a vegetable.” The men were glad to see me again. The beer emboldened me, my head swirled. That bright Sunday morning, I felt like I’d finished some long and difficult and dangerous voyage and was being congratulated.
I’d not seen that many Ironworkers since riding the bus to the Powerhouse.
Did I want a beer someone asked?
Sure, why not. I think yes right Kerry was too young to drink and I watched as Jeremy put the cue ball up atop of the short pool table large men stood and bent over looking to make a shot that would go in the hole and thus become successful and make it and exclaim and sometimes the entire bar would—for no apparent reason--turn their attention to the large men at the small table as if a farm or a season of harvest or a lot of money was riding on it when in all actuality was just a chance to play the next game if you won you’d take on the person that had already put their quarter beneath the rail between the corner and the side pocket to the right and watch them rack it up as you put chalk on your bent stick and “pffuuf” blew on it. It was never designated as such the place to put the quarter, it’s just what everybody did, what everybody’d been doing for years.
It was before the Bud Lite revolution so a series of red full beers so crowded the table beneath the clock and next to the jukebox there was barely room to smoke. Kerry sat at a right angle from the pool table, her table near the only window talking to Hubbard ladies and men, pleased to have her company for she was pretty and the child on her lap and sometimes a truck or pickup or tractor could be seen driving past.
Jeremy put the scratched cue ball on the table. Kerry talked to the bar patrons and I drank beer with the Ironworkers among whom I was both a curious sight to behold and a celebrity.
I looked up. “Yeah, I know, Father,” I said, ever respectful to the cloth.
However, the Church’s teachings on marriage, I knew, were more relaxed. Previous church doctrine had forbid divorce.
“I quit taking the medication that was supposed to help my anger,” I said into black eyes bearing down on me. “But now I’m taking it again.” There was no excuse for my actions, my anger, my hitting her. I was surprised at the sickness and rage that’d welled up in me that drunken afternoon. My brain felt empty, my head hurt.
Father Kresnick was not inclined to equivocate. “I told her there was no way she should continue with this marriage. I suggested she stay away until she decided what she wanted to do.”
The tear was now a break. Our Father had brought the ax.
Rev. Kresnick related how he’d been a boxer and that it was true cowards he thought that beat on their wives. Father’s jaws tightened; Kerry’s confession had made Father Kresnick so mad he wanted to duke it out with the husband.
I thought Father wanted to go a couple rounds.
Instead, Rev. Kresnick took a deep breath. Like all the others who’d now come unannounced into my path post-accident, who deigned help me with life steerage, advice was offered. The Man of the Cloth suggested counseling.
“I think you do need some help. Your drinking, your accident, your anger. I think you’d better get some right away.”
I left the rectory crestfallen. I walked through the dark parking lot behind the church and Rectory, looking at the gym. I’d first met a friendly girl wearing big glasses during a basketball game years ago. I was in 8th grade at a small Catholic School miles away. We took on St. Mike’s in a basketball game and were beaten soundly. Kerry was in 6th. She wanted to know all about me and thus fell in league with my sister Mary, also in the 6th grade. She was a pest, I thought, more than anything.
Now, a few years later, the gym was silent to the night and locked against the winter cold. Their last bouncing of the ball years past. Was our marriage quickly to follow?
Desperate, I looked for a way to proceed. I’d been working on the farm, driving for a few weeks. Maybe if I got back on the iron, got on with business again, things could be patched up. The little green house on the corner of the small town would again erupt with life, spilling out of old crooked doors and tall drafty windows.
Recovery would be complete. I’d show them. I’m not a vegetable. Life would continue as before.



*************
The new paving circled the flat 11,000 population town and put you just a couple blocks from the bridge over the Missouri, eliminating a straight drive down the main thoroughfare, Dakota Avenue. The bridge funneled vehicles to the nearby city and adjacent state; the interstate ran north and south along the river; large trucks replaced barges; cars replaced canoes.
Construction sites sprang up like huge metal camps along the winding river, Unit 3 Port Neal Powerhouse 12 miles downstream from Sioux City. Because electricity demand was at an all-time high, the river was reharnessed, refitted. In short order, coal brought in by railroad cars was transported then pulverized and furnaced. It became electricity. Power lines were strung like large welding arcs over the tri-state region, much farther than the eye could see. And, because it was booming, the smell of money was in the air. Boomers—Ironworker journeymen from other locals--and other trades men from all parts of the country rode this wave like hand-callused surfers. They washed into Siouxland’s iron-coated gold rush, pulling trailers hitched to their American-made trucks--kids or an old lady hung out the window, for a better view, resettling settlements.
There was no telling when the energy and construction demand would abate; a family could settle, a man could make his fortune, dreams along the flatlands—despite cold blasts in November and swirling gray dust in August--would come true.
“This is where you’ll retire,” was often said, believed, and passed around. Work was dangerous and work was good.
By reflex, developers closed their eyes and saw nothing but ribbons of road, new white concrete, power lines standing upright in farm fields stretching everywhere. With new business plugged into power lines, with people to have businesses to consume the sudden expansion, profit’s could be realized, money to be had at every turn of every switch.
Hence, a highway was widened over here, a bridge built over there. Small wooden stakes were pounded into green sod today, a four-lane highway and a truckstop will be here tomorrow.
City fathers and county planners cut ribbons and kissed babies and raised their hands for pledges and declared how tri-county motorists no longer need drive through the heart of a town itching for a break. It would save time, they said. Get more done, they believed. Make more work, make more money. This energy brought forth by construction became a chant, a credo, a cheer. There was enough to go around for everybody…and everybody would get their fair share…because that’s the way it worked.
Farm lanes and shade trees were bulldozed over; morning sound of birds chirping, cows bawling, and wind wafting through brush and trees and pushing clothes hung out to dry were replaced by saws and hammers and dust and grease. Black diesel smoke throttled over cleared ground. Mounds of yellow subsoil pimpled up on the terrain.

Part of my nuclear family planning did work. After begging Dr. Hoarst Blume to sign a release, to let me get back to work, I got ready for the exam. I showed how I could walk easily again, my progress in therapy. Dr. Blume—not reading the complicated messages behind my urgency--thought yes, maybe Icould return to work. I felt my shape was returning, my spate of jism lapse over. My days of speech and physical therapy at the Rehab--still like a bad dream I couldn’t wake from—were nearly over. I’d learned the alphabet and started to read sister Jenny’s 2nd grade books. After months of leg exercise, I ran around on lose gravel around the block--first steps urged by injury dictates.
While this was all well and good, I couldn’t forget where I once was, what I thought I once had been.
Moreover, my hair now covered the scar across the scalp. I knew I was a vain young man vain easily given to affectations—I no longer felt people were looking at a hole in my head. Nagging doubts lingered and, despite yeoman efforts, I was still alone.
And, because I could drive again, visits to the shrine of the in-laws increased. If it wasn’t a visit, it was a call.
“I don’t know, Ronnie,” Kerry’d say, kindly and quietly, from the womb of her parents’ blue house in a quiet, unassuming neighborhood, “I’m just tryin’ to get things sorted out.”
Sis Mary’s admonition from years past I tried not to think about: “What Kerry says and what Kerry does are two different things.”
Didn’t I know there wasn’t a China man’s chance in hell?
I tried to block out thoughts that just maybe she wouldn’t come back. I replaced them with long drives on hilly gravel roads that skirted the small town. Jeremy rode shotgun on the passenger side door handle. He leaned and I pointed like I remember dad had done on drives through the county years before.
Despite drives to the farm, Jeremy never stayed overnight. His little bed hadn’t been slept in for months. I stared longingly at it—made but empty. It spurred the visits, a drive on Highway 35. I looked out at the setting sun on the hills behind the house, at a couple of corn bins bordering Grandpa’s land. These were the hills behind the house where I used to run, where, when I was growing up, used to plow and disc. Later, where I used to ride horses and shoot over the terraces rounding the cattle home. This was all before the fall. I wondered--would it ever be the same?
Now, Jeremy shared sleeping quarters with Kerry’s two sisters and brothers. It was a cobbled, make-shift arrangement I despised but, as with many things now before me—but nothing much about it could I do.
However, I got it squared away so I could return to Ironwork at the Powerhouse.
“Look, Dr. Blume, give me a chance. I’m feelin’ all right. I’m workin’ on the farm and drivin’ the tractor,” I said. I’d just be more careful.
“Well, then, squeeze my hand,” Dr. Blume ordered, his thick German accent and large frame insured quick command of the room.
Seeing my growing impatience, Mom reminded me, “You don’t realize how bad you were. One time, Dr. Blume grabbed you by the shirt, slapped you on your face and said, ‘I’m Dr. Blume, I’m the one who saved your life.’ You looked at him and said, ‘Big fucking deal.’ The nurses couldn’t’ believe you said that. He was so renowned as a brain surgeon. You’ve come so far. Are you sure you want to go back to work?”
“Yeah, I think I better go back to work.”
“What about Dee, the representative from Ebasco,” Mom said. “Can’t she help you get some counseling?”
“I don’t need counseling,” I looked at mom, and across the gentle slope of green in front of the house. “I just need to get back to work. I can’t make it on workmen’s comp, $60 bucks a week.”
“I know, Ronnie. But you can work on the farm with your dad, you can move in with us.”
It seemed like all this was but a step backwards. I didn’t need any more of them.
“No thanks, Mom. I’ll be all right.”
Ironwork return was a first step forward—the road back. I’d jump on the new building energy, ride again the construction wave. Many dreams were still in the iron: mine I hoped hadn’t run too far away.

Yet, the former state of marital bliss was not the only thing that had changed upon my return. Dark red iron for Unit 3 in eight months had risen mightily; a series of hard right angles punctuated the horizon, glancing off the river. The 700 ft. smokestack 100 yards north of the main structure climbed like an iron beanstalk up over the tallest tree around—Joe Reed’s crew circling ever skyward—and shot up over the bluffs on the Nebraska side of the river. The construction boom called and clamored. Midwestern men were heeding it.
I had to get back before it was too late.
I now also had a different red Ironworker hardhat—I’d no idea what had happened to the other one. I did have some idea about the clothes I wore the day I fell—Mom said she’d burned the bloody blue-jean jacket and pants in the burn barrel behind the blue split-level house. Kerry’s brother Dave, who began to do sheet metal work at the Powerhouse, had borrowed my work boots.
Everything, Dave said, was going “real good” out at the Powerhouse.
Count—what the new foreman called me upon my return—
felt it strange to see someone else wearing the boots taken off a near-dead man. None of Kerry’s family, however, thought it was strange. Somehow, it was what was expected, what would be the order of events, what was foreordained.
“Can I get my boots back?”
“Oh yeah, sure, no problem.”
Somehow I was relieved the only thing left untouched was a pair of bright yellow spud wrenches. They were, however, of little use to me now. Other changes were in store: my Ironworker time post accident was now in the yard, on the ground, contractors not daring another fall. My duties now were finding and marking iron with part-time farmer Roland, Indian journeyman Gene booming in from the West, young Jim—who’d rolled a 300 game at the local lanes--and me. I watched the men walking the beams high above the ground, striding across the iron and channels. It was something I did as easily, as effortlessly, not ten months before. Watching Ironworkers stride across high steel—now something I could only watch.
It just wasn’t the same on the ground.




By the time I reached the job site, the mist was nearly gone. I got my brass at the gate—number 236 stamped on the tin. I’d started the job with #70—had it been retired after the fall? It meant that he’d been the 70th IW hired on for the job. There were, then, more than 100 more workers hired on the job since.
Not quite so sure of myself anymore, I’d have to see what this day brought.
As the story went, Jim’s dad had been killed working iron in Texas. “There’s no way I’m going to go up,” he’d pronounced, pulling on his gloves and glancing around the job site through a pair of round glasses. Indian Gene was between jobs and large, round Roland, getting enough money to turn tractor payments around and make a banker happy, was content to plant himself on the sandy soil he dreamed of driving his new tractor over.
Along with pusher Jim Reed, we comprised the yard gang, five men walking around a flat beam-filled field looking down at small slips of paper in large gloved hands; then at the sea of red iron around them. Emery, a laborer, would come by every so often with his truck. After the yard gang found the iron they’d shake it out and then they’d load it on. I watched as the pile of beams and stairs and sheets were pulled slowly into the expanding structure; Emery’s chains rang rang on the concrete.
The shack filled quickly with Ironworkers; blue denim and brown boots paraded before my eyes, the decade’s non-uniformed soldiers of fortune.
With a slight breeze over the Muddy Mo, the gods had foreordained a clear Monday morning, holding forth all manner of potentialities. I wasn’t quite as depressed as when, a couple months ago, for no reason, he took his black permanent marker, used to mark yard residents beams, channels, angles and other erector set pieces, and wrote on my pants leg the repeated lyrics of a popular song
“Takin’ care of business. Everyday.”
“Takin’ care of business. Everyway.”
Prob’ly just after Kerry and Jeremy left.
“It’s all right.”
Wife and child crossed the Rockies where two years before we’d honeymooned in a tent. Now Kerry was with the new man and they were home free.
He built her a palace overlooking the great hill. Jeremy would forget.
“Takin’ care of business and workin’ overtime.”
Of course, I thought it’d be more interesting—pop lyrics over the pant legs--than it really was. I thought it would look pretty neat, something of a statement I was trying to make. The black marker, however, made the print too big. The T and the G were almost behind his leg. The code pretty much undecipherable, message lost.
My depression was prob’ly the weekend when Kerry finally retraced her steps. I was at the living room window. I watched her drive up with a few friends. Jeremy had not come along for this ride. Just before, a guy I’d grown up, now farmed outside the small town, had backed his cattle truck easily up to the edge of sidewalk like it was a cow chute and walked with long steps to the front door.
I knew that this was the day conceived in some huge puzzle I could not unravel.
“Hello, Ron, how you doin’?” Pat said. We’d hauled silage together in the late summer, corn in the late fall a couple times, the two farms sharing harvest duties.
“Fine.”
I didn’t like having anyone enter in the green house to take away the collection of never-matched furniture, something I thought would be in the Whole Earth Catalogue. It was that part of me that was on a return-to-the-nature bent—we often went to the thrift shops in town for furniture. We were then, I reasoned, only a short step from the commune.
It’d only be just for a little while, I thought, before something better came along. I didn’t know how true that statement was.
And, ever to rise to the occasion, said to Pat—like we had to go haul some corn-- “Well we may as well get started.” My gaiety at seeing Pat had always been reserved for harvest and homestead.
I staggered through the dark kitchen and headed for Jeremy’s room, like a moth, attracted to the light. I knelt down on the hippie-type bed that was mattress and box spring on the floor, surrounded by red borders. I lifted the mattress and at the corners of the box spring saw a few bolts and nuts.
Only when Pat, wearing a yellow Dekalb seed cap, stood over me and when I looked up and asked, just like they were on the farm, “you gotta pair of pliers?” did I almost lose it. My hands started shaking. I unscrewed the bolt and suddenly the box spring sprang free. I remembered carrying it out of the house and to the back of the truck, trying to keep, for some reason, the blanket and the pillow in place.
It filled just a small portion of the large cattle truck. Some piece of wet straw stuck to the truck’s floorboard--from pig shit that had dried and hardened by more weight of pig feet—that the family’s furniture was being carried over.
Pat hadn’t put the endgate in; the sides of the rack flopped and the small load shifted as he pulled the cattle truck up over the small ditch and back onto the gravel. I was amazed that, as the ungated cattle truck pulled up over the yard, their possessions, their measure of a couple years of marriage, filled but half the box, the bed bought from money from the Ironworker benefit softball game taking up the most space.
A pickup truck, maybe, might’ve been a better call.
I thought back to the loading of Kerry’s stuff from her house in South Sioux after we were first married. The 12-mile ride to my hometown was joyous and rickety. My brothers rode in the back of his dad’s old cattle truck—we’d left the endgate on—whooped and hollered, parking in front of Grandpa’s hotel. It then changed their prior sleeping arrangements on the clean wooden floor Kerry said was hard, awakened by the morning sun through the eastern windows of the upper rooms.
I helped move a few more items with “yeah I guess so’s” until Kerry drove up. Then I found himself in the background and got out of the way and just sat down and watched our small history unfold, unravel.
I didn’t get invited to help unload.
“Yeah,” I thought, “it might’ve been that weekend.” The Monday weighed especially heavy. I saw Ironworkers coming into the shack. I saw an old classmate slap a guy on the back.
Kevin Monahan, at the Powerhouse all this time, saw me looking over. He advanced. Doors of the Ironworker shack slammed open and shut as men came in to take their leave of the day. Monahan and I had graduated from the same school a few years back. Monahan went right into the Ironworker trade, now nearly of Journeymen status. His big, brawling hands, his brothers already journeymen, Monahan commanded a measure of respect on the job.
Monahan, I heard, had come into the silent shack that fall morning and hollered, “Why wasn’t that net up?”
Monahan was hence someone who had slightly more than a passing interest in my affairs.
“You workin’ with Reed in the yard?”
“Yep.”
“How’s it goin’?” That ain’t so bad is it?”
“Nah, not really.”
Other Ironworkers continued to walk by, some of them, especially St. Cyr—who was eating sunflower seeds and spitting them out in front of him—strode past with a swagger, spud wrenches clanging. He’d also hooked on a babe, Stephanie Rench, who would follow the Ironworker wife precepts and leave not long after Leo went in the hole, his walking days then over.
Dugglehimer, Ironworker General Foreman, was handing a blueprint to Junior Hughes, giving him the run-down on how he’d do the rigging for the precipitator.
They both glanced at me briefly and resumed their conversation.
“You take care now,” Monahan said. “Don’t do anything dumb.”
“I won’t.”
Monahan had surveyed my writing--now graffiti--without comment.
Reed appeared from out of nowhere and handed Roland and Jim and Gene and Count--a name Reed started to call mefor some reason--a list of iron to find, shake out, and get to the structure. “I ‘spose Junior can’t do his work until we did ours,” I thought, looking at the near undecipherable writings on my jeans, realizing I’d prob’ly ruined them.
A long low whistle blew. Jackets and legs and blue jeans and tools flew, Ironworkers headed out the door to resume their wrestling match with the iron, with the time, with the day.
I watched men head for the structure and I waited for the truck to take ‘em to the yard. I sat with my partners on the flatbed ride to the yard bordered by green corn shoots; long green rows stretched into the lifting fog. Before first coffee break, they’d lengthened to the interstate then jumped over it.




Chapter Two
The Powerhouse Revisited
“You got an angel on each shoulder, buddy. I didn’t think I’d ever see you around.”
Journeyman Ironworker Danny Caskey, Local 184

And before I knew it, an early summer day twenty years later had arrived. Sioux City Local 184 sent me to the Nucor turnaround which got me to Norfolk, NE, ink stains from the classroom yet on his hands. “My shit pile’s bigger ‘n that,” remarked a lanky Ironworker sitting at a round table, observing the slice of lemon meringue pie in front of his partner.
A number of Millwrongs and Ironworkers had come in for the afternoon break. A slow hum could be heard around a square cafeteria smack dab between huge furnaces that melted scrap iron from huge metal heaps bordering the plant. Brown-booted men waited in line to order food and sit down.
Unperturbed by the comment, the man threw large spoonfuls of pie in his mouth; brown hair matted to his forehead.
“Says here that Warren Buffet’s worth $18 billion,” observed another, putting down a folded newspaper. “I’d just take $3 billion.“
Another chimed in. They’d made it through a good share of the day, the last day of the turnaround, the mood upbeat as they approached day’s end.
“Just think if I had that money. I’d have a whore every day for the rest of my life,” exclaimed another, looking around at sweaty men laboring over their food.
Hard work makes you hungry.
It had been déjà vu, this summer of Ironwork. A guy I’d worked with at the Powerhouse in the 70’s strode up to me earlier in the week. He stuck out his hand.
“They said I’d be working with Hartnett but I said ‘He’s not working anymore’ but then I thought Jim Hartnett but then when I saw you I knew it was you.”
Danny Caskey put callused hands on his hips then pushed back square glasses. He leaned down and looked intently. “How you doin’ buddy, it’s been a long time.” Between grease-coated girders and the hum of factory crash and bang they shook--first time in twenty years.
“Great,” I said, “I’m feelin’ great.”
“What the hell you been doin’ with yourself?”
“Oh,” I yelled over the din of the large recycling factory, “I’ve been at Omaha Public Schools the last few years.” I tried to be both succinct and casual, I tried to put two decades in capsule form. “And other places before that.”
“So you’re a teacher, then, is that right?” Caskey said.
“Yeah, I’ve been teachin’ last few years,” I said. “It’s goin’ pretty good.”
Caskey turned and looked at me. “So you came out all right with everything?”
“Good as can be expected, I guess.”
“You’re lookin’ good.” Caskey turned around. Other Ironworkers were coming up to them to get their tools out of the gang box. “I didn’t know what happened to ya.”
“Oh yeah.” I tried to mask my pleasure—an old buddy recounting my near-death, those wild days at the Powerhouse. Did Caskey remember they used to call me Count at the Powerhouse? Did he remember I had to work in the yard gang after I came back to work? Somehow, some resonance had been attached over the years. “I’ve been pretty lucky.”
And, working with Caskey, it wasn’t hard not to look back. Danny pried open the door to an Ironworker-in-a-young-marriage past. Suddenly, I was on the school bus ride to the Port Neal, chuggin’ a few beers after work on the way back to the El Char. Goin’ after Kerry and Jeremy like a lame duck, tryin’ to get back on my feet again. It was like it was last summer instead of years and years ago. Some things you just never forget.
Reinforced like No. 8 rebar were daily comments by a gritty and powerful Caskey, one of the toughest hands out of the Sioux City local, who takes shit from nobody and—like all Ironworkers—lays it out straight as a plumbed I-beam.
That is no bullshit. That is from the heart.
“You’re a walking miracle,” the Local 184 Ironworker said. “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”
“I guess, like they say, it wasn’t my time.” Inwardly, I was glad I could work iron again—never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d ever be strappin’ on a structural belt again. I felt like Lazarus coming out of the grave.
“You got an angel on each shoulder, buddy.”
Caskey looked closely and shook his head.
“You should be in the Guinness book of records.” He pulled the welder’s black lead up to his shoulders, over the white protective suit. A smear of black grime coated the suit like thick film, making indentations as he climbed. A guy could get pretty dirty in a short time. He also could get hurt bad real quick.
“Yeah, I know,” I called to his back. The wiry Ironworker ascended the ladder like a throne; he welded reinforcement angle iron to a conveyor belt the size of a basketball court that hot steel shot over like lava.
“I guess I’m pretty lucky.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you were around, I didn’t know what happened to ya buddy,” Caskey said, glancing down from his ladder .
“Eyeballs,” he called. He gently tapped the stinger to angle iron, sulpher and gas and flame shot out. We were reinforcing a walkway where Nucor men could watch a hot bed of molten iron shimmy and shake over the grating.
Later, holding the ladder, feeding the lead, because the subject had been brought up, I asked, “Did you see me go down?”
Caskey looked at me then looked away. “I was workin’ on the precipitator with the Big Indian. I didn’t see you go down. But I saw you on the ground. You weren’t moving,” Caskey said.
“It’s good to be working with you again.” He turned and threw his hood down over his head. The rod arched to the iron. Welding sparks flew.
Suddenly, the week was over. “So good to see ya again, Ron.” He stuck out his hand. We shook hands again.
“And ya know,” Caskey said, staring intently, “this prob’ly doesn’t mean shit to nobody, but me and Ak can give you a good recommendation.”
Ak was the pusher for the gang.
As usual, I didn’t know what to say. Leaving the school last week, putting away my books and turning over my grade book and keys for what I thought was the last time, I felt like a piece of shit--couldn’t do anything right on the teaching end. All the people all the time, crawling in and out of the classroom, taking notes or filming me or having me go some where to watch other teachers.
In fact, in none of the subsequent meetings with the principal or curriculum specialists, dubbed “Post-Observation Conference,” did I clearly state my case, why I thought I was doin’ at least an adequate job. At least, I was doin’ everything they’d told me to do, bein’s I was on intervention.
Now, out on the iron with Sioux City Local 184, where I was expecting some rough sleddin’, coming back after a long lay off, I was greeted with respect and, I liked to believe, a sprinkling of awe.
“No shit. Well, that’s great.”
“As a matter of fact, every time you go to the hall we think you should have it set that you get sent out on a job. You earned it, buddy,” Caskey said, starting to strip off his white safety suit.
Then I remembered something I’d meant to say for a couple days. Through clear safety glasses I looked at the back of the white form in front of me: “Give me a hug.”
“Sure, I’ll give you a hug, man. I just hope nobody’s lookin’.”
“I don’t give a fuck who’s lookin’.”
Caskey and Hartnett grappled. What the hell, he’d seen me near dead twenty years ago. He jumped in and pushed the ambulance out of the sand with the other Ironworkers. Did he remember the benefit softball game for Kerry and Jeremy and me after I got out of the hospital?
Watching the overhead crane haul a large turbo they’d cut out earlier that morning to a truck backed into the building, I thought about those days before and after I fell, before and after our family fell apart.
Structural ironwork on Unit 3 Powerhouse. Bolt up gang. Caskey on the precipitator. Francis Burcham from Waterbury, my partner, another farm kid--we skipped’ washers across the Missouri during lunch. I loved to fly across the iron.
Now, twenty years later, I’m buddy, I’m back up on the iron. Moreover, wasn’t I not caught up with a little respect? The respect from having been through something of a prolonged battle yet coming out. Not unscathed—but yet alive.
I lived to fight another day.

He was sure the Sioux City boys knew who he was when word got around--did they cut him some slack? Or were they just afraid he’d fall again?
General foreman Jerry says, “Be careful,” watchin’ the school teacher go out on the iron walk out on a 6-inch beam, just a little unsteady, to unhook a choker
Ak, who worked on Unit 4 when the teacher went in the hole, warned “Don’t be goin’ out there, Ron.”
The marginal teacher looked at Ak and took off. It was now or never.
Earlier that morning, the teacher stood safely by the column that shot five stories into the air. He watched ironworkers below rigging up the iron. They attached two chokers on either side of the pile of thirty foot decking. They latched it to the hook then signaled the crane operator.
“Okay, take ‘er up easy.”
The huge Bantam crane tightened the ½” chokers, the decking came off the ground ankle high.
“Okay, take her on up.”
The sheets of decking suddenly were airborne, swiveling from the pile of iron, moving up over the highest beam, up over the roof. The Ironworker on the top beam, a connector, signaled the operator to swing the load on center..
The load swung slowly over to the part of the structure near the school teacher.
“Okay, bring ‘er down easy.”
The load landed on red iron beams not twenty feet from him. He was the only one around unhook the chokers and free up the rig.
Would he wait ‘til somebody else came and did it? Or just stand there and watch?
No, he knew had to do it. He had to walk out there and unhook the chokers.
Yet, he couldn’t crawl around on the iron. It had to stop. He did it the summer before. He felt like shit. Besides, it takes too damn long. He played the cautious stance before--it only got him laid off.
And now, twenty years later, not very far away, Kerry slept soundly. She turned in her sleep and felt, in her dreams, a hand falling across the back of the guy she married. As the fairy tale goes, they lived happily ever after.
She smiled subconsciously and nestled deeply beneath the covers.
She knew when the going gets tough, the tough get awesome.

Walk the iron, you can do it, walk the iron, you can do it.
I hesitated a second. I watched as other Ironworker’s walked across and unhooked the chokers. No big deal. Well, what the hell, I wasn’t gonna stand there all day and watch them work or coon my way out there. Again I . I looked at the cement floor below. I shuffled my feet right angle to the beam. I took a few cautious steps.
I saw the river again. I was just 20 miles upstream, 20 years removed. I hoped no one saw me hesitate, my hand no longer safely glued to the column. Like stepping into a fight, my heart went to my throat as I pushed myself off.
Now three tiny little shuffle steps away from the column, I couldn’t get my right foot to cross over to the left. However, if I started going down, I could jump to the I-beams running parallel four feet on either side.
I swung the right ahead of the left. What I thought was an eternity of doubt and indecision took maybe just a few seconds.
The silent red iron felt strong and firm—I felt a sudden elation as slow steps picked up speed. My strides were good, no cause for concern, my frequent leans and stumbles around the house and in the classroom were just because I don’t pick my feet up. I walked the rest of the way easily to the load of decking. I scrambled up to the top, signaled the operator to bring it down just a hair and unhooked the chokers. I held the two hooks together and signaled the crane to pull away. He pulled the Klines of his pocket and quickly cut through the bands. I climbed down off the decking. I walked back over the open iron to the column—cautious, surprised and relieved.
Of course, no one said anything, but a few surprised glances came my way from guys I worked with last summer, who never saw me walk the iron.
The worry and concern that’d stolen across both General Foreman Jerry and Pusher Ak’s face replaced by a mixture of joy and conviviality. When they went back to the shack for the morning coffee break: the air was lighter, the guffaws louder, and the smiles quicker.
No one said anything. But they knew I’d made it. Their weakest link had held the chain together—this day.


The Nucor job the summer before, stepping into the Ironworker trade for the first time, I stepped from one world to another, from the BD classroom to the iron.
“Yeah, we got some work in Norfolk,” the Local 184 BA Jerry Swisel said. “They’ll be doin’ a turnaround for a week or so and oculd use a couple hands. Just see Jack when you get there.”
And while I found Norfolk easily enough, locating the plant was a different story.
It was somewhere outside of town a few miles, they all said. Yet, after I’d crossed and re-crossed the same set of railroad tracks, the Nucor plant nowhere in site, I stopped a feed-capped farmer in his large gray pickup.
“Can you tell me where the Nucor plant is?”

The man looked down at the lost stranger in his small red Jap truck and threw his arm back, his thumb extended.
“Right back that way.”
And sure enough, rising up out of the mist, I saw the green outlines of buildings, undulating in the heat with the corn in the prairie.
“Thanks.”
Turning back and traveling south, the outlines of the buildings became more distinct. I see a small guard shack behind a steel cyclone fence.
“I’m an Ironworker from Local 184,” I said to a young man that leaned out and looked at me. “I’m not sure where to go.”
The guard at the shack showed me where I could hook up with the Nucor plant manager.
“See that building down there?” He pointed through the morning haze at a small rectangular brick building a half-mile up the road. There was a flag in front of the building and a large Mack yellow dump truck with huge wheels a hundred feet in front of the building, its snout upturned and pointing at the road.
In the two summers I was to work at Nucor it had never moved.
“Okay, thanks.”

Thinking I was late, I hustled into the office. I looked at a half mile of green plant. Posted on the wall of the building that faced the highway were the terse commands "Safety is your responsibility" and "Lock out, tag out."
The pee-test was the first order of business. We stood outside a small brown building I later learned was the basement of the cafeteria. A couple Ironworkers, finding that a test was the first order of business, promptly took off.
Barb, who oversaw the handing out of bottles for specimens handed me a cup and pointed to where I should go to provide the sample.
“Hey,” called one of the Ironworkers, a stout man with long hair wearing a red bandana, “you gonna come in and hold it for me?”
Barb handled the comment with aplomb.
“No,” Barb replied, not changing her expression, handing out another vial “I think you’ll be all right.”
“Well,” I thought, “not too much has changed.”
The race card was also still on the table.
Maybe there's hot anger on the hot steel. Mark, who shared the same hotel with the teacher, was cordial if not overly pleasant. Maybe it's a sign of weakness if social pleasantries are extended.
Mark put a red bandana around a head of curly black hair. Tattoos stuck out from the bottom of his large forearms and moved when he tied his bandana.
Mark sat across from the teacher at the cafeteria a couple times. Banal pleasantries the only information exchanged. Sometimes he was asked about the classroom, about teaching.
While this was the second year in a row the building principal—who was black—had tried to get rid of me, I didn’t harbor any resentment. I figured Dr. Mitchell was just doin’ his job.
In the trades, however, the old anger yet lingers.
“They’re all niggers to me,” Mark said, looking at a few blacks lining up in the cafeteria.
And, since most of what we do is learned behavior, I was sure Mark, looking to be his mid-20's age, either inherited this anger or it was somehow forced upon him.
Barry, and Ironworker who originally hailed from Texas, took a different tack.
“Only some of them are niggers,” Barry said.
Barry had been my boon companion. He’d always salute me with, "Teach, what's happening?" in a light southern accent.
Barry’d clarified the race issue.
"There's blacks and there's niggers and I'm sure we all know what a nigger is."
Barry's eyes were wide open. He looked down at me. Barry’s a rangy 6 ft plus—with a serious look--all-defining and all-encompassing.
We’d just finished lunch. We stacked the trays and pushed empty plates lightly smeared with ketchup back of the wall to be washed. We picked up our hardhats from the old mobile coat rack that stood by the door. We smacked our hardhats back on, zipped up our white protective garments and got ready to move onto the afternoon.
“See ya later, Teach.”
“See ya later, Barry.”
Stepping out in the brilliant sun, dust eddies stirring up from the feet of the men, I speculated on demarcation lines. I wondered if I should’ve commented.
But I also knew it was tough to launch into a discussion because when I began to expound, my voice sounds weak and tinny. It wasn’t the voice the Ironworkers care to hear bandied about the cafeteria.
No, it’s just a permit hand tryin' to play Ironworker, tryin' to play teacher. A teacher, really, tryin' to play teacher.
No, the voice they like to hear is Acks. He was ever and always spinning some tale of a past experience. I first heard Ack my first summer at the Nucor turn-around. I happened to be seated at a table close to the middle-aged Ironworker. Ack lamented was that he'd have to miss the large concert planned for a Fourth of July celebration.
"Just think, 13,000 pairs of tits,” Ack said, shaking his head, “and I can't be there."
Ack was one of the few ironworkers who wore his hardhat at morning break, lunch, and afternoon break. He wore it the entire ten-hour shift. It was a white hardhat, worn bill backwards, that was covered with black spots and decals and other incongruous items—a roadmap of a skilled craftsman's life.
Ack could usually be heard getting after Norm, a short aging, early 50’s laborer. The bullshittin’ would begin sometimes around breakfast and wind its way through ‘til last break.
The banter would run something like this: "Hey Norm,” Ack would call over a couple tables, leaning forward in his chair, a cigarette in his mouth, lighting it, tipping back. A general hush fell over the cafeteria where the Ironworkers sat. “Yer lookin' pretty spry this morning."
The smell of eggs and the hiss of sizzling meat spilled out from the kitchen. Ack’s slight accent and hardy voice cut through the fry of the morning.
“Did you get your turtle in the mud last night, Norm?" Ack would call across the table in his best Easy Rider Jack Nickolson, whom he sounded and looked exactly alike—if a couple inches shorter, Ack’s hair a foot longer. His elbows were on the round table, one hand cuping a cigarette as he leaned slightly forward.
Norm looked up from his eggs and over at the voice. Norm laughed. “No,” he said, almost in apology, “the ol’ lady’s outta town.”
Ack looked like a bantam rooster, hardhat bill backwards, ready to strike. Indeed, one would have to fashion him as a pugilist of sorts.
Journeyman Sam, who’d also been a teacher, and my partner last summer, looked up without comment and continued to work on his crossword puzzle.
Sam said he'd been a school teacher at some kind of small high school for three years then decided that wasn't going anywhere and began working iron, making as much money as he had in three years of teaching.
“I also coached football,” Sam said, moving his nose, looking up from the crossword puzzle. He usually had it done before the end of the last coffee break.
“Once one of the kids smarted off and I kicked him right in the butt,” Sam said. “I didn't have any trouble after that.”
Maybe, I thought, given the Ironworker’s mien of not pulling a punch, they’d be a good force in the classroom. Big enough and tough enough to kick the respective kid in the rear end. It would eliminate all discussion and debate as to who exactly was in charge here.
Yeah, lawsuits would no doubt be filtering down the pipe right and left, tyin’ everything and everybody up but it sure would be refreshing.
It’d worked for Sam. I never had much luck with that type of discipline. My best line last year was to student Adrian, burly smart 15-year-old, his dad just out of the pen after an extended hitch. Adrian one morning said to me, coming a little closer than usual, "I'm gonna beat you up."
I looked at Adrain and it came out of my mouth before I could even think, "I've been beat up before."
It threw the kid off guard. Adrian quit coming to school.
“No,” Marv, said, looking up and over at Ak and said smilin’, “I didn’t. How about you?”
“Oh yeah,” Ak said, lit cigarette dangling from his mouth, “me and the missus is startin’ to get along better.”

Driving back to the hotel, driving between row after row of cornfields, I thought how ironwork was ‘bout the same as it was twenty years before. When there’s a strong economy, businesses start or expand. Land outside the Nucor plant is now being cleared on the other side of the road, just behind the parking lot and a square brick building where men showered after a day of black soot and iron dust.
The new building would allow even more small hills of tin and metal scraps to be recycled, made into rebar and small beams. A rolling pasture weeks before, sprinkled with Holstein cows and cow patties, had been bulldozed and earthmover scraped. Now, a loaf-sized mound of man-elevated yellow earth was covered with a cropping of thick green weeds. By next year's planting, a factory would sit squarely on the small rise. By harvest, processed steel would be readied to load and truck—like ancestor grain—to flashpoints around the globe.
The Nucor plant was one of the few places in the Midwest—since the Port Neal Powerhouse Stations had been finished years ago—where there was steady union work for a few hands. A few more hands, like me, were hired on when it's plant "shut down" time—Fourth of July and Christmas breaks for the factory workers—when designated sections of the buildings are overhauled and fabricated, stairways or guardrails added or replaced. This ironwork is called fabrication by the trade and requires a general fixing up and streamlining.
Caskey and I worked in the basement of the processing area, building a 100 foot walkway where plant workers monitor computer-controlled 30 foot sheets of 2-inch flat iron as it works its way through processing. It's their assigned task for what turns out to be eight, 10-hour days.
Along with Caskey and me, the gang consisted of pusher Gary Ackerman--known as "Ak"--and Chuck, a five-year journeyman. Through the roar and the noise and the dirt we made fair progress getting the guard rail attached to the conveyor belt, moving a section at a time.
“Dan and Ack were both at the Powerhouse,” I thought.. “Five units went up in all. I wonder how many total fatalities there were?”
For awhile, the heavy construction was Sioux City's Alaskan pipeline. Work was sure to be good for a long time.
However, with Unit 5 done, the work ended as quickly as it’d started.
Now, a decade after Unit 5, gray smokestacks rose massively above corn and soybean fields. They dotted the Missouri River just south of Sioux City, Iowa. Ak and Dan and many other Ironworkers had started their apprenticeship building the Powerhouse Station Unit 3 through 5.
“Yeah,” Ak said, putting a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, “that’s the year I started. In fact I just got started on Unit 4 when they said somebody fell on Unit 3.”
“Yeah,” Caskey said, “it was my first year.”
While their goal was get in the Local 184 and go through the apprenticeship to be a journeyman ironworker, I wanted to make a quick buck to get back to school
The fall changed all that. It changed a lot of things.
It didn’t change my mind about owing the Ironworkers a huge thanks for heaving the ambulance out of the sand and then after I got out of the hospital raising $900 during a benefit softball game.
I remember how Kerry, Jeremy and I watched the game. The local paper took our picture, the last time were together in the public arena.
And working with Dan and Ak it felt like I was still getting on the Ironworker bus in South Sioux, Tom Stevens behind the wheel, headin' for the Powerhouse. It was almost like it’d been just a couple months instead of 20 years, the memories so vivid for those who worked the Powerhouses, the Tri-state area's gold rush.
"Yeah, I didn't think you were around, I didn't know what happened to you, buddy," Dan repeated, staring intently at me then looking away.
A small boom could be heard, iron being fabricated. An alarm like that from a small firetruck was heard from the ceiling crane; it signaled a load moving through the building.
"Yeah. I'm surprised to see ya. I couldn't believe it was you when I saw you. You are a walking miracle," said Dan, placing a hand on his shoulder.
It was almost like a class reunion--on the iron.
"I know, I'm pretty lucky," he said, as Dan moved away with his welding
stick, climbing up the stepladder to bind the brace to the beam.
Finally, the last day, I thought to say. I even rehearsed it.
"Well, I'm certainly leaving you in a different fashion than I did before."
"What's that buddy? What do you mean?"
"Well, last time I was carried out on an ambulance, this time I'm walkin' off the job."
I wasn’t sure how Dan Caskey took the comment. "Oh yeah, right," he said. "Good luck to ya."
But now, third summer on the iron, I thought I was getting better.
Veteran Ironworker Jack on the metal building at the Sioux City Airport, the week before the Nucor turnaround, got suspicious.
I had my structural belt and full bolt bag on. I had every intention of getting up and bolting up the joists that had been swung across the iron just like I did twenty years ago. Jack’s eyes were on me as I climbed the 30-foot ladder. For some reason, he didn’t like what he saw.
"Come down off the ladder," Jack called up.
I cursed himself for opening my mouth about the accident. “Yeah, that was me,” I’d said in the shack when a guy wondered if I was the one that fell out at the Powerhouse.
Taking a breath, I climbed down.
On the ground, belt on, bag full of bolts, gray spud wrenches dangling and banging against his knees, I followed Jack to the outside where all the iron had been pulled off the truck.
I knew I had to say something. I hate being put like a SPED kid in a least restrictive environment. For me, it would’ve been staying on the ground marking iron or sorting bolts.
A large airplane flew overhead.
"I don't want you goin' up there," Jack said, turning to me.
"Why?” I could feel my throat tightening. “I'll be all right."
"You didn't look too good climbin' the ladder," he said, fixing me a stare, his hands on his hips. "I don't wanna be responsible if you get hurt."
I could feel myself getting angry. It was the last thing I wanted to do: be on the ground, on the concrete, watching another guy high above, doing the all work.
I’d lost some of the fear walking the open iron through last summer for Local 21. While iron on the job site was only 20 feet above the ground with concrete below, I got so I could get out there if I took my time.
This structure was twice as high but I thought I’d be ok.
"Hey, I can do it,” I said, voice rising, hands on hips. I just couldn’t stay on the ground. It’d be like I was admitting defeat. “I'll tie off, I'll coon the iron."
Jack looked at me with a steady stare. What did he read in the eyes?
The Local 184 Ironworker didn't say anything but turned and took long strides to the snorkel lift.
I followed, not knowing what to do. Jack grabbed the controls. I lifted the latch and climbed in.
CLINK went the gate. I settled into the basket.
Wordless, Jack pushed the control forward and up we went. A mini-Ferris wheel ride through the clear light of the June morning and soon we were at the top of the structure.
I clambered up out of the basket. I felt the lift sink a little as he I put my foot on the outer frame. I thought this was worse than when I climbed off the ladder.
I put my boot on the beam’s flange and climbed over an eight inch I-beam runnin’ north and south.
Jack lowered himself to the ground. I was again up on the open iron, straddling it like an iron horse.
What to do, what to do, I thought. I reached down into my bolt bag. I tried to try work a 2 1/2" bolt into the overlapping metal purling that overlapped and ran east west across the beams. It took me awhile to get the bolt through. Jack looked up. He’d almost made up his mind to me climb back down when Darrel, on the other beam, accidentally moved the other end of the purling. I saw an opening and poked the bolt through.
Soon, I was able to stick a couple more bolts and crawl onto the next section, Jack watchin' me from down below. By midday, I found himself walking the iron again, gaining confidence with every step. Jack no longer watched.
It was the first bolting up since the Powerhouse. If I he looked hard enough, I could see the smokestacks of the Powerhouse down river; a steady blinking light. I just believe I was doing it--on the river, in June, bolting up.
My exhilaration returned: I felt like Ibsen's a character in "The Master Builder." No, I wasn't as quick as journeyman Darrell at getting around the iron, I was again walking it. I could deliver.
It just takes me a little more time.

Bob, of Local 21, on another job weeks later, related how he went down 18-feet and busted up his shoulder. I said how I fell 65-feet. Bob then told me how he almost knocked his oldest son, Bob Jr., off the iron, 100-feet in the air. Bob Jr., eating his sandwich, said "Yep, lucky I saw it comin' and was able to get out of the way."
None were boasting, we were just stating a fact of the construction trades. When the BA at the hall asks me, “Can you do structural?”
I shrug his shoulders. “Yeah, I can do structural”
But, of course, because of time passage, it certainly doesn't seem like that big a deal. None of the guys chowin' down had any idea of the extent. You could say you fell 600 feet and it wouldn't really make that much difference, particularly if you're able to pretty much walk and talk and get around. The funny things is, I forget how bad it was until I run into guys like Danny Casky.
Maybe it has to do with what's apparent. I looked over at Bob Sr. munching away on his sandwich. He sure looked okay to me.
“Yeah,” Darrel said, “I don’t like that Nucor. I was up on the cherry picker workin’ up there and somebody started the overhead crane. I just got out of the way of the thing or it would’ve tore my head right off.”
Jerry, the pusher said, “Yeah but you lost a little bit, didn’t ya?”
“Yeah,” Darrel said, smiling, happily eating his sandwich in the trailer, “I wedged a piece of iron between the cage and the crane but couldn't get my big finger out of the way.”
Only half of it remained.
Jack, who’d chided Teach on extension ladder climbing, frowned at my bare hands.
“Don’t you have any gloves?” he demanded.
“No,” the teacher replied. “I usually don’t wear any.”
Like some ironworkers I’d worked with, Jack ate lunch by himself.
It was only after I walked the iron did I see Jack’s hand. He always had gloves on but this time, around lunch, he showed him his right hand; the middle two fingers chopped off at the knuckle.
I stared in disbelief. “How’d that happen?”
“Out of nowhere,” Jack said. “A large piece of railroad wheel came rolling down the rail. Before I could get my hand out of the way, it ran over ‘em.”
“Yeah,” Darrel said. “That was right after my accident.”
“Somehow the wheel broke lose.”
Jack, like Darrel, stated this matter-of-factly. He kept eating his lunch.
Accidents have their own degree of relativity.
************
"School’s out for the day," Ak said, as he watched me labor over a section of flat iron with the torch. Finding my iron-cutting skills wanting, watching Chuck cut iron left and right ,straight as an arrow, I asked Ak if I could practice.
“Sure,” Ak said. “Why not?”
And, while my first two cuts weren't too bad, the third quickly took on a life of its own. It would be no big deal, we could grind it off. Now, however, a couple more pieces had to be cut.
Best to hand the torch back over to Chuck, was Ak's reasoning.
"Ok." I was glad two were okay, failing on the third. For a minute there, I thought I had it all figured out.
Soon after, I walked with Dan on the way to the cafeteria. Usually, Ak would announce break and off each one would go, usually single file, the noise a too loud to carry on anything more than a short conversation. There was always a "What?"
But, because I had an idea I couldn't contain, he ran ahead.
"I wonder if they have one of those spare suits around?” I asked Dan. White suits are provided for workers. The iron rust and grease from the plant is hard to get off.
"What's that buddy?" Dan asked, leaning over me, his hand on my shoulder. They were nearing the large opening of the plant, high enough for a train car to move through. Small clouds of iron dust arose as they walked outside the building. Other Ironworkers and laborers and Nucor personnel, sweating and dirty, converged on the cafeteria doors.
Now we could talk.
"Those suits we wear,” I said, “I wonder if I couldn't get one to take back to school with me."
Dan thought maybe I was puttin' him on.
"Now, why would you want one of them for?" he asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
"You know, to show the students what are some of the things you might need to have when you're working on a job, when you're part of the work force,” I rattled.
Dan couldn't quite fathom the reasoning behind it.
"You mean, you're going to take a suit and teach a lesson? What could you possibly be teaching them? What could you possibly use them for?"
They were now outside the building and beneath the morning's bright sun almost straight ahead. Clouds of thick gray dust rose from the ground as we walked on either side of the unused railroad track. Ahead, the magical door of cafeteria swung open to welcome the men to breakfast, to coffee.
"You know, Life Skills, Social Skills, get them ready for the job,” I said. “You know, workers visiting the BD Students from all walks of life, really see and hear what it’s like to hold down a job.”
Part of the problem with students was that they got so bored with mind-numbing workbooks and hand outs. It might be a chance to talk to someone, from the trades particularly, who actually worked hard every day to make a living.
By that time, Ak, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, joined in with Danny as they climbed the stairs to the cafeteria.
“Oh yeah?” Dan said. “I don’t know about that.”
The Ironworkers Ak and Dan began to talk about something else, out of my earshot. It was the last break of a 10-hour day. Everyone was pretty much too tired to think.
Like some of the finesse of teaching, it wasn't really that important to them.
Like some of the finesse of teaching, it was really important to me.
And all the days before, and all the days after.