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PARTISAN REVIEW
never understood, for example, why the way he spoke was funnier than
the way they did. Their eyes when they looked at him had been grave,
wary. At the end of a week, pay day. These were all men working ille–
gally for one reason or another, and they were paid less than half the
union rate. But Ben had earned enough money to take to the old woman,
and she had been pleased with him. Two more weeks...and a new man
had arrived on the job and from the first he had needled Ben, taunted
him, grunted and growled. Ben had not at first known that these were
meant
to
be his sounds, nor had he at once understood when the man
had pushed and jostled him, once dangerously, when Ben was standing
high, streets far below, his feet straddled from beam to beam over space.
The foreman had sharply intervened, but after that Ben had kept an eye
on this youth, a grinning, careless, show-off redhead, and had tried to
keep out of his way. Another week. The money had been paid out inside
a little shelter the men used for moments of rest, or when it was raining
too badly. He and the redhead had been last in the line to be paid, and
this was how his enemy had planned it, for when Ben's envelope was put
into his hand, the young man had grabbed it from him and run off,
grunting and scratching himself and crouching low and bounding up,
and then again: Ben had known this was meant
to
be a monkey. He had
visited the zoo, moving from cage
to
cage looking at beasts whose names
he had been called, ape, baboon, pig-man, pongo, yeti. There was no yeti
in the zoo, nor a pongo either, and he had wondered about them, for he
knew he was looking for something like himself.
He had looked helplessly at the foreman, hoping he would protect
him, and had seen him grinning, and had seen on the faces of the men
standing about, their envelopes in their hands, that look, that grin. He
had known he would not get help from them. He had worked a full week
for nothing. He had been so full of murder that he had had
to
walk away
from it, and had heard the foreman call after him.
"If
you're here on
Monday, there'll be something for you." Meaning, not money, but work
for those great shoulders of his that had saved them, the others, so much
effort. And he was back on Monday, at first looking down into the site,
hands on the wire, as if he had been inside it and not out, as if it were a
cage, and down there were the men he had worked with, but the redhead
had not been there. That was because he had grabbed Ben's money and
was afraid
to
come back. Ben had worked that week slowly, carefully,
watching faces, watching eyes, moving out of their way, or positioning
himself to take the big weights that were easy for him and not for them.
And then, at the end of the week in his envelope had been half the money
that was due him. He knew that was half what proper builders got, real
