“I’m looking for my dad,” I told a clerk. “Jackson Trawnley. He’s got a job with the WPA.”

“You’re asking at the wrong office then,” he said. “You need to go—”

A man in work clothes, wearing a hard hat, turned from a bulletin board he was reading. “Trawnley’s gone,” he said. “Left weeks ago.”

“You know him, Red?” the clerk asked. “He was on your crew?”

“Nope, I wouldn’t take him. Came in with a chip on his shoulder bigger than he was, asking for a job like it was the government’s fault he needed it.”

The clerk said, “Easy, now. This here’s his kid.”

“Well, I’m sorry,” the one called Red said. “But I’m fed up with men who hire on and then don’t want to work for anybody, or with anybody.”

“But he was working here?” I asked. I had a bad-feeling knot growing in my stomach. “Did he get fired?”

“I don’t know that,” Red said. “But if you want to tag along a bit, I’ll find you his foreman.”

“Trawnley. Yeah, I had him,” a young man told us, without taking his eyes off a six-man team reaching up to guide a huge metal wheel suspended from a crane.

“Easy out there!” he yelled. “Work together! Mind each other!” He didn’t turn to Red and me till the piece was in place and the men all safely away from it.

“Now,” he said, “Jackson Trawnley. No, I didn’t fire him. I’d probably have had to sooner or later, but he saved me the trouble when he left.”

“You mean he quit?” I asked, hoping I’d misunderstood. Maybe the man just meant my pa had transferred to someone else’s crew.

“He blew up over an order I gave him, drew his month’s pay, and lit out. Against regulations, but I wasn’t sending anybody after him. Men that have to do everything their own way are a danger to everybody.”

He hesitated before adding, “Same as men who don’t control their drinking.”

That distracted me. Made me hope, too, that perhaps he had Pa mixed up with somebody else. “My pa doesn’t drink,” I told him. “He never has held with liquor.”

The older man, Red, the one who’d brought me out from the office, asked, “When was the last time you saw him?”

More than two years ago, when he walked off alone outside Muddy Springs, leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves.

I asked Pa’s foreman, “Do you know what he was going to do?”

“No idea. But I did hear he was headed to Miles City,” he said. Then he added, “Look, you’re not old enough for WPA work yourself, but you might find something at one of the rooming houses or eateries around here.”