Lester and Vera stood and backed away from the edge, never taking their eyes off Simon.

“You know what this’ll look like when we’re done? All sided in glass, a huge lobby four stories high. The floor laid out in marble. Sixty-thousand fuckin square feet of marble. And it’ll be theirs. It’ll be all theirs. They’ll have some black man in a uniform at the desk. And they’ll tell him not to let me in. They’ll tell him to ask me my business.”

He spat out over the edge. Lester and Vera stood still, as if their movement were Simon’s movement and if they shifted suddenly he would step over the edge, he would fall.

“You’re hammered, Simon.”

“I ain’t even started yet!” he roared. “So up here. This,” he thrust out his arms, “this is all mine. This is all mine,” he repeated, turning in a slow circle on the six-inch wide girder. He took a step forward.

“God, Simon, don’t.”

“So am I scared?”

“Don’t, Simon.”

He took another step forward along the beam.

Another. Vera and Lester followed, edging sideways. Simon kept going. Vera and Lester pulled up short, tethered to the far side by their harnesses. They didn’t want to take their eyes away from Simon long enough to untie themselves. Simon reached the upright and stepped out with his left foot and swung around the corner like a kid swinging on a flagpole. His muscles tensed, the long tubes of his triceps bunched under the smooth felt of his skin.

Vera squealed and grabbed Lester’s hand but dropped it immediately, the flesh too warm and alive to be secure. Instead she clenched her fingers in the thin fabric of Lester’s overwashed T-shirt.

“Do something. Do something,” she whispered. Simon turned and walked at a right angle toward the center of the building. Lester and Vera both slumped in relief. He was still fourteen feet above the steel floor but that fall wouldn’t kill him.

“Dad shoulda done this. He could do anything, Lester. You name it. He could drop a tree on a dime. Patch a canoe. Roof. Sew nets. Shit, Les, he could do anything. Too bad you don’t remember nothin.”

“I remember some. I remember he killed a moose once.”

“Shit,” said Simon scornfully, “he killed everything that moved.”

“I remember. Get down.”

“You don’t remember nothin. I bet you can’t tell me one thing he said. One word.”

Simon sped up and walked at a normal pace on the beam, arms swinging. He stepped around another upright beam at ninety degrees to the other, starting on the third side of the square.

“You don’t even know what happened.”

“Tree fell on him.”

“Bullshit. That’s not what happened. You don’t know.”

“That’s what everyone said. Everyone knows that.”

Simon shook his head. He was almost trotting along the beam.