He walks out on the porch. The city crew is already stringing orange tape around the sidewalk. Simon walks down and steps over the tape. The machines haven’t arrived yet. It won’t take long. Since there is so little to do until the dozer and the Cat arrive, the crew contracted to wade into the mess armed with sledges and five-foot pries huddles by the tailgate of the pickup and shares coffee from a battered Aladdin stopped with a wide cork. They are cliquish, sipping the steaming coffee and smoking, moving their heads away from the wreathed smoke to observe the traffic. Simon knows the stance. The casual gestures of men used to manipulating their environment. They are apprised of the changing shape of the city well in advance of the motorists who look from under visors and through closed car windows at the demolition site. He knows the attitude and the type of pre-job conversation grunted between sips and pulls, the oblique dig for hip flasks. The ordering of past jobs, the slow shift from job to story. The dirty brownstone job no one wanted where on the last check they found the old lady in the attic surrounded by saltines and TV dinners. They had to carry her. Though she wouldn’t move, she didn’t protest either when they managed her down the narrow attic stairs and into the arms of her worried relatives. They were gentle with her; they knew she was not sitting up there, her mind locked in a previous decade, out of protest. Being there had become a habit she couldn’t break.

Or the other time they had to shell a house on the Northside. They emptied out all the interior walls and supports so they could fold the house in. They’d entered with sledgehammers and Sawzalls and set to work. Plastered in the wall of what must have been the old pantry they found six coffee cans full of silver dollars.

These are the other histories of the city, distant from the chartings and building codes of planners, not visible to the people on the street or driving by, all of whom are over-concerned with the skyline and right-of-way. The workers alone are aware of how the houses and tenements of the city grow around the people in them. This is the real history: the record of human dross.

Simon approaches them and asks for a cigarette. One of them grudgingly reaches into his vest and pulls out a Kool.

“Hope menthol agrees with ya.”

“Shit. Smoke agrees with me. You guys on permit?”

“Hell no. We’re on the roll but nothin much is goin up. Gotta take a knockdown to pay up the Xmas bills.”

“Never much liked demo,” Simon lies.