“He’s your responsibility. If he goes for a dive it’s your fault. If he gets someone else hurt, you’re payin the widow. Go get a permit at noon.”

That was that.

By the time they began work on the IDS, Simon had been working steel for seven years and had earned himself a place on one of the high steel crews. When Simon walked to the site at the corner of Eighth Street and Marquette he grew silent and walked slower, letting the businessmen rush around him. When he got to the lot, he was brooding, looming over the other workers. He joined the Indians on the lift and walked out onto six inches of metal twenty stories above the sidewalk.

After they punched out they walked into South Minneapolis together, ambling down the sidewalk, all of them marveling at the texture of the ground under their feet, shocked at the great expanse of it. It looked so smooth from above, so even and unbroken and simple.

During the summer they shuffled along until they found their way to Cressen’s Bar or the CC Club. They took up two tables and let their arms creep onto the chair backs of those next to them, expansive in their weariness and pride.

After the first nine months of construction at the IDS they started building up from the ground. Nine months just for excavating and sheeting, for pouring the pilings and the substructure concrete. Then Simon and the others urged the building into the sky. As they clipped and bolted the frame together, he always looked southward while his neighborhood came into perspective. It wasn’t until they had been at work for eight months, when the IDS inched over the Foshay Tower, that Simon could make out the roof of their house peeking from behind the soiled brick of Stevens Community. He paused between loads of beam and searched the stunted buildings for some recognizable part of their house, and he saw it. Each day, as they circled the building adding floors, he looked to the house and knew Vera was there with Lester. Betty was at work and the girls were at school. He was hanging high above the city. Lester and Vera were in the house alone. He was inside her, or she was biting his calf, his ear, his neck, marking him with a hidden map of their passion and time together. He thinks back, and as always, when waiting for his trial and then during ten years in prison, he rules out jealousy as a motive. He didn’t want what Lester had, didn’t really hunger for her young body. But maybe, maybe if he’d met her first, if he’d taken a different walk home, had reached out to her on the street, then everything would have been different.