See, in the middle of Lower Manhattan sits a big fucking hole.

It’s as wide as the base of the Chrysler Building. Not nearly as deep – not this one, anyway. This one’s maybe four stories down, with a series of branching tunnels leading off it. It’s a hub. A hub to bring the diggers to various jobsites – the new water tunnel (#3), the new tunnel opening the 7 line of the subway, and other smaller projects.

All around the hole is a massive worksite. Forklifts rumbling. Shipping containers clanging. Wire bails and fuel tanks and thousands of bags of concrete.

He never worked this site, but he worked others just like it. Smells of churned dirt and blown stone, of grease and exhaust and oil. And sweat. Above it all, the vinegar stink of sweat. Sometimes it’s hot down in the dark, sometimes it’s cold, but with all the gear the Sandhogs have to wear – the galoshes, the slickers, the overalls, the hardhats, the masks – you can’t help but sweat.

I don’t belong here. That’s the thought that keeps going through Mookie’s head, tumbling over and over again like a rock bouncing down a mountain.

He used to belong here. Thirty years ago. When he was a young buck, just out of high school (more like just failed out of high school). Working his father’s crew. His grampop up in the work trailer, pushing a broom, shoving a mop, missing his left leg at the knee and hobbling around on a leg the guys made for him, a heavy-ass limb made out of a wooden salad bowl, some leather straps from an old hospital gurney, and a length of rebar.

Grampop was tough as they came. Like the beef jerky in Mookie’s bag. No fat, no gristle, just dehydrated muscle and hard leather.

Not to say his father wasn’t tough, too. Pop was built like an oil drum. Lower teeth missing from when a rock popped up, dislodged by a hammering jack-leg, smacked Pop right in the mouth. Tongue swollen for weeks. It earned him a new nickname: Rocky.

Pop was a fire-plug of a man, but even he was afraid of Grampop.

Grampop would hear about something you did on a job and he’d thump you with a mop-handle and dress you down in front of all the guys – and he was a quick wit, his tongue a loose and lashing cable. Mookie remembered him calling Pop a “thick-necked buffalo with a brain like a shit-bucket”. One time Mookie wasn’t paying attention in the tunnels and put a ladder down on loose scree – the ladder came falling on top of him, cracked him in the head, gave him a concussion. Grampop said, “You’re dumber than a truck full of broken toilets, slower than cold molasses, lazier than a car-struck cat, and uglier than the inside of a donkey’s asshole.” All the men brayed with laughter as Mookie stood there, his face a mask of dried blood from where the ladder had hit him, and that made Mookie mad – he suddenly took a swing at his father’s father. The old man ducked the fist like a bum sidestepping a slow-moving train.