He is proud he never lost consciousness. His body was numb from the middle of his back down. His shoulder felt shredded. Simon had been on the second floor and he didn’t wait for the lift or a ladder. He slid down the beam to the first floor and he jumped the rest of the way.

One-Two could talk and the foremen gathered and the site manager was there. They knew, and One-Two knew, that they’d lost the rest of the day.

You feel okay? asked the site manager, a bald man with a permanently sunburned crown. We’re gonna move you to the trailer until the ambulance gets here, he said.

One-Two nodded to say that he understood. Simon stepped in front of him.

“Like hell you’re movin him.”

“We’ll lose a whole day here.”

“You’ll lose your fuckin head if you touch him,” said Simon, lifting his spud wrench from his belt. One-Two was scared: he couldn’t feel his legs. He couldn’t sit up, and the pain in his shoulder and arm was spreading. He looked at the site manager, framed by Simon’s spread-legged stance.

“Simon, you don’t understand. If we lose a day, it means we lose about ten thousand dollars.”

“You ain’t touchin him unless you want to fight me now and the union later,” stated Simon. “That’ll slow you down right quick.”

That’s how it went. Simon stood guard over One-Two’s body until the paramedics came and strapped him on the body board and took him to the hospital. One-Two thinks back, he counts it out and is surprised: Simon was only twenty-six years old at the time.

One-Two’s body was ruined. They put a steel pin in his hip, gave him a new shoulder joint and immobilized his back for six weeks to give it a chance to heal. He’d crushed two vertebrae.

After the accident the crew visited him in the hospital and when he was released Simon kept him up-to-date on construction. He talked crew politics and union position. He filled in One-Two on the gradual emergence of the building.

Neither he nor Simon was there when it was finished. Simon was in the middle of his trial and One-Two was learning to walk again, and he read about the completion of the steelwork in the papers with a mixture of pride and anger. They had put the last beam in upside down: painted white and signed by the mayor and many of the steel workers, there was so much writing on it that the placement markings were impossible to read.