Brooklyn Noir by Tim McLoughlin Page A

scared. Two kinds of work were obtainable in the world: the safe and the dangerous. Experience and practice never made Dad unafraid. Silently, without fanfare, he tolerated extreme fear-states and accepted the probability of grave injury or death as standard workaday inevitabilities, like lunch with the gang or alone up on a scaffold, like fatigue, like fumes. His morning routine: get into whites, shave, shower, shit, like a military man, brush teeth, drink pot of coffee, slap on boots and cap, drive to site, start working, get crushingly, heart-stoppingly,
fittingly
panicked about dying in the coming hours. Dad did frightening things that other people didn’t want to do; other people didn’t have to do them, because people like Dad did. Blood poisoning did him in after twenty-four years of exposure to industrial chemicals, mostly paints containing an odorless, oily, poisonous benzene derivative, absorbed through skin:
aniline blue. Aniline blue
sounded like a song title or poem, the name of a daughter or lover. Lyrical, sing-song
aniline blue
killed him, but before that happened, I’d planned on his dying in a bridge fall.
     
     
    There were laws against it.
    Child protection laws with tucked-in bylaws that defined bringing children to dangerous workplaces as criminal offenses. Take Our Daughters to Work Day wasn’t designed for the daughters of pile driver, jack hammer, or forklift operators. Taking kids to perilous worksites violated child endangerment laws, laws ratified and upheld—lackadaisically, since the continuance of selected human genera wasn’t a big deal, even when specimens were found in bulk—for protection I didn’t want.
    The laws against it didn’t stop us. Did laws ever stop anyone who wanted to do something really bad from doing something really bad? A failure of nerve stopped us.
His
All his. He, the adroit, well-built, well-practiced man, who did it daily, for real, chickened out. I, who hadn’t yet mastered long division or my dread surrounding it, was ready to jump right in.
    Upon starting work at a new job, Dad would half-promise and half-threaten to cart me along to the worksite, fix me in place around his tough neck, my legs parted, one leg dangling off each of his shoulders, and lug me around the job all day, up and down the tiers of the bridge, everywhere work required him to be while he painted. A regular workday, but with a Beth on his back. He’d try not to let me fall. He’d do the best he could. His six feet and three inches—a tall Jew!—guaranteed me an even better view than his of water, sky, skyline, land, of the whole place that Mark LaPlace, a mixed-blood Mohawk, who, along with many Indian ironworkers, drove in every week from the Caughnawaga reservation near Montreal, called the City of Man-Made Mountains.
    Earthbound, at home or school, the world was scary and too big as it was. High on a partially completed bridge, higher yet on Dad’s shoulders, the world would swell to unmanageable dimensions, awesome frights, sickening beauties. The anticipation of visual sublimity wasn’t what thrilled me at every promise-threat. I thrilled to Dad’s singular power to scare me, to his correspondingly exclusive power to soothe me. Dad could reassure me; I’d
believe
his reassurances, trust in them, because he knew, the cells that made him
him
understood how bad fear could get. Climbing together, he’d have his rope, hook, muscle-meat, and deeply treaded, break-a-leg boots, acting on behalf of his physical integrity and safety. All I’d have was a perfunctory pat on the head,
knock ’em dead, kiddo
, and his body. I’d be terrified and love it, love him for terrifying me, for his unique capacity to assuage terror he’d authored himself. If some evening, he’d casually, passingly mention taking me up—
maybe tomorrow… you never know, do you?
—the next morning, suited up in my dungaree overalls, prepared for action, I’d park my tush on his lunch pail, so he couldn’t