TRAFFIC CONTROL
Greg M. Hall
MOKUHINA|North Bend, NE
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, places, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental.
Cover Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (User:Thue), 2005
TRAFFIC CONTROL
Copyright © 2010 by Gregory M. Hall
Published by Mokuhina Consulting, LLC
710 Main Street
North Bend, NE 68649
ISBN-10: 0615347207
ISBN-13: 978-0-615-34720-2
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To Jana
For all that you’ve put up with
and continue to put up with.
1
Allison Gomez let go of the steering wheel, switched the cell phone to her right hand, and turned on the wipers with her left. Her knee kept the wheel in place, so her little Ford Focus didn’t drift too far over. Her friend Megan continued to chatter about how unfair her new boss was.
The April rain grew heavier as she swept around a curve, hugging the concrete barrier wall that divided Lamb Canyon Road. On either side loomed walls of tortured geology; huge boulders jutted out at random angles. Allison regularly ignored the natural beauty on her commute to classes at Mt. San Jacinto Junior College. The canyon was a nuisance to her; it broke up her phone signal and caused her to slow down almost to the speed limit.
She was between Interstate 10 and Hemet Valley, where Lamb Canyon Road emerges from the San Andreas Fault and straightens out. The worst section is just north of the valley, when a series of sharp turns combines with a six percent downhill grade.
It makes for an exciting and challenging drive, even if a motorist has both hands on the wheel and the phone turned off.
A song Ally was sick of two weeks ago came on. She had to look down at her radio to change the station.
<+>
Cruz Ibanez wasn’t one to curse at things he couldn’t control, but his partner Randy Beers was. The rain wasn’t going to let up, like the Boss had hoped, and CalTrans stuck to their rules religiously, so there wouldn’t be any paving today.
“This sucks, bro.”
Not looking up from the road as he bent down, Cruz grabbed another orange cone, and handed it up to Randy. “Could be worse. We get paid for half a day.”
“Half a day ain’t gonna cut it for very long,” said Randy, who, Cruz noted, couched most thoughts in threats and ultimatums. “I got child support.”
Cruz was still happily married; in fact, getting home early might mean Rosa wouldn’t have to take the kids to daycare on her way in to work at the mall in Moreno Valley.
“Can’t ever catch a break,” Randy whined. “My beer fund’s down to nothin’. Someone at the Hall has it in for me, man. I was on the bench way too long.”
Wouldn’t be because you complain about everything, pendejo.
They picked up another three cones in blessed silence before Randy said: “How much longer you think this is going to take?”
Cruz passed another cone up, his hardhat-shielded eyes squinting against the rain. “Another ten minutes for the cones. Twenty to hook up and tow the arrow boards back to the yard. Clock out by ten, maybe.”
Oscar “Oso” Cardenes, who had the seniority necessary for the plum assignment of driving the cone truck, kept it crawling along at a steady speed. His eyes darted up to the rearview and he said something, but his window was up and the two laborers in the back didn’t hear.
“That guy runnin’ this job acts like he’s so much smarter than us,” Randy said, “KNX said it was eighty percent chance of- Shit! Watch it!”
Cruz had only gotten his head halfway around when the gray streak of a car blew by him, missing the truck by inches. She had to be doing sixty, easy. But the worst part was she’d decided to pass them on the wrong side, in the lane they’d intended to pave. When she got around the curve and saw the paver, she’d yank the wheel over and run over a half dozen cones, probably kicking them all over the road, and they’d have to scramble to get them out of the way.
Why people had to be in such a hurry was beyond him. On a rainy day like this, everybody should take it easy.
<+>
“I thought you liked music.”
“Yeah, I thought I did, too. But my prof is such a-”
Ally saw the truck, in the left hand lane, picking up orange cones that had been set on the dashed line, going way too slow.
“Ally? Did I lose you?”
There was a little Mexican guy on a platform on the back of the truck, reaching down and grabbing the cones, handing them to a scuzzy white guy that stood on the flatbed.
“Ally?”
“Hang on.”
She was mostly in the left lane (okay, so her left tires were over the solid white line that delineated the breakdown lane) and they were on a left-hand curve. Ally had to choose between hugging the concrete barrier on the inside shoulder, or jerking the wheel all the way right and possibly losing control as she did so. It was a no-brainer; the little Focus tucked neatly between the truck and the barrier rail.
“There.” She brought the Focus back into the driving lane, little cones flashing by her on the right side as she continued around the curve.
“Sorry, Meg, just some idiot road crew blocking everything off. So anyways -” a small beep in her ear changed her sentence into a growl of frustration. “Hang on. Someone else is trying to call.”
She lowered the phone, hoping it was finally Mark from Sociology class - he had her number since Friday – and squinted to make out the number in the rainy gloom.
It was her father’s number.
Not now, thought Ally as she put the phone back to her ear and looked back through the windshield.
A grease-stained metal maw filled her view, ready to swallow her up. In the half second before impact, so many things went through her mind: what is this, who put it there, no time to go right, can’t go left with the wall there, I’m screwed-
All that came out of her mouth was: “Oh.”
<+>
To Megan, “Oh” was followed by a sharp crump and the faint, high-pitched clink of a dropped call. She tried calling back, but it went immediately to voice mail.
“Hi, sweeties, this is Ally, and I’ve probably got a dead battery. Leave a message, and if it amuses me enough I’ll …”
Megan flipped her phone shut, unaware that those were the last words she’d hear from her friend.
2
Carl was drunk at nine in the morning. Pathetic, he thought, you have to get lit just to call her. Maybe she didn’t answer because she could sense he was hammered.
Damn cell phones were supposed to make everyone more reachable. Instead, they ratted your number out so someone who didn’t want to talk to you didn’t have to.
The phone was in Carl’s left hand, a screwdriver in a plastic fast-food cup in his right. He looked back and forth between the two, afraid to set either down.
In the end, the screwdriver won out. After all, it didn’t make excuses about why it was too busy to see its father. The drink didn’t make him fumble for the right words, and when he finished imbibing, it didn’t make him replay the consumption over and over in his head, wondering if he did anything stupid.
The phone rang seconds after his last swallow of sweet, tangy liquid. Carl pounced on it, not even checking the Caller ID.
“Hello?”
It was a male voice, definitely not Ally’s. “Brew? Is that you?”
“Uh… oh, hey, Match. Wait- Match? Heyyyy!”
“Whoa, Brew, you hammered already?”
Kinda, thought Carl as he kicked a chair out from his table and sat down. “No, not at all. Just forgot how long it’s been, y’know? You back out? I have a hard time keeping track.”
“Yeah, I’m back out. Sort of.” For as good as the news should have been, Michael “Match” Hatcher, Carl’s longtime cellmate, sounded glum. “Halfway house for six months, then I’m unleashed back on society. They’ll never learn, will they?”
Carl laughed at his old friend’s flippant attitude about being in and out of prison. “You just gotta do something really bad, bro, and I know you like people too much to kill someone. Aren’t you past three strikes anyway?”
“Nah. This last hitch was in Arizona.”
“Oh. You weren’t in that pink-underwear tent city I see on the news, were you?”
That drew laughter, deep and rich enough to be coming from James Earl Jones. “Praise God, no. That’s a county joint, and I was doin’ time in one of the State’s fine facilities.”
“Armed robbery again?”
“Aw, hell, Brew. You know I’d never actually shoot anyone. This last time I didn’t even bother to load it, y’know?”
“How’d they catch you this time? Wait, never mind. You’re back out, not heading back in.”
“Right. For the moment. But you know me… can’t seem to stay out. How’d you do it, Brew?”
“I never really wanted in to begin with,” said Carl.
“Neither did I! But… I see what you mean. You go apeshit and hospitalize some dude, while I lick my chops thinkin’ about how I’m about to knock over some bank. Damn, why do I have to be so good at taking money from people?”
“You could be a fund raiser. Just talk to people, imagining you’ve got a gun. Work your magic over the phone. After all, you said it wasn’t about the money, but the thrill of chasing it.”
Match didn’t say anything for a few seconds. “Naw, that wouldn’t be the same… at least, I don’t think it’d be the same. Huh. That might not be as stupid as it first sounded.”
“Tell you what: you make it out of that halfway house, and want to come back to SoCal, I’ll see what I can do. I work for a charity now. They help autistic kids; I do their books. They can only afford to give me a couple weeks a month, but at least I don’t feel like I need to wash off after I get home at night. I thought I’d hate it, but it’s about the only thing that gives me a decent feeling about myself.”
Match’s end of the conversation was quiet for a moment, so Carl added: “Or, I might just be full of shit. You’ve got a while to chew on it, right?”
“Right. Hell, enough about me. Last time you wrote, you said you were moving back to see if you could patch things up with your daughter. How’s that going?”
“Still working on it,” said Carl, trying to sound casual. “I’m kickin’ myself for not trying sooner. She’s an adult now.”
“Don’t know nothin’ about kids, but if you’d have tried when she was a teenager, I don’t think it would’ve gone any better.”
“Probably not. But yeah, still working on it.”
“Jenny been a pain about it?”
“Not at all,” said Carl. “She’s been dead for most of a year.”
“Ouch. Sorry, man.”
“No biggie. I came back to make my peace with Ally, not her.”
“Guess so. Look, Brew: they only give me a few minutes before someone else has to use the phone, and the guy in line behind me has some Eme tats, if you know what I mean. It was good talkin’ to ya.”
“Good,” said Carl. “You always were a decent guy, deep down. I’m really glad you called.”
“And I’ll think about what you said, seriously, I will. I just don’t know about this whole ‘job’ thing. Don’t know how the hell you do it. If I change my mind, any way you’d want to-”
“Not a chance, Match.”
They said their good-byes and hung up, while Carl thought a little about his ex-cellmate. Match didn’t have anyone on the outside, either. Maybe that’s why Carl wanted so desperately to get back in Ally’s good graces: without someone to love, what was the point of being out of prison?
What was the point of anything?
<+>
People are going to get hurt from time to time. This was a secret motto for Ted Bosworth; such sentiments were ‘loser talk’ to his bosses. But what moron couldn’t see that sometimes there were just freak accidents?
The heap of twisted metal glistening in the steady drizzle was testament to that. Dumb little bitch blew through their cones, was driving in a clearly marked construction zone, probably speeding, probably high on something.
CHP came out, initially in force with tape measures and spray paint, taking photos and making notes. Ted saw a couple of them looking up at the canyon walls, pointing at features, and wondered if that was relevant or they were just sightseeing. There weren’t even any skid marks on the road, or any evidence of the driver of the vehicle losing control, so there wasn’t much forensic work.
It didn’t take long for the investigation team to dwindle to one last patrolman, left behind to get all the information he could from Ted’s guys.
As the Job Superintendent, in charge out here, he’d been the first to talk to the cop. He tried to sound as sensible and intellectual as he could; a good accident report would keep the guys in Fontana from climbing all over his ass worse than they were already going to be.
Ted hoped he’d shown the right amount of compassion while the medics loaded the gurney into the ambulance and slammed the doors. The glance he’d gotten at her body as the firemen did the grim extraction was a horror show. He couldn’t even tell what her age was, if she was cute or not. Mack, grizzled vet that he was, dry-heaved. Ted knew that if he was going to be a leader through this tough time, he’d better not.
The officer had moved on to Mack, the paving foreman, but Ted knew he’d soon be talking to the crew. The traffic control truck was parked about a hundred yards up the hill, its driver and the white laborer talking while the Mexican laborer stood brooding off to the side. In truth, though Ted considered his performance important, they were the priority in this little crisis.
He started toward them, and looked over his shoulder at the cop and his foreman. “If it’s all right with you, officer, I’m going to see how my guys over here are taking it.”
The patrolman nodded, not even looking up from his notepad as he scribbled down Mack’s description of a paver’s weight.
As Ted approached, the white laborer said something sideways to the driver and straightened up, like he was a kid that had just been caught passing notes in class. Ted said, in his most authoritative tone: “Gentlemen – how you holding up?”
The driver, his name was O-something, talked first. “We didn’t really see nothing. Too bad about the lady.”
Next came the white guy, a recent hire that Ted didn’t know. His hardhat said his name was Randy, but Ted decided it should be Gomer. “She was driving crazy. Almost hit ol’ Cruz here while we were pulling up cones.”
The air was sucked out of the conversation as Ted narrowed his eyes and straightened his back. He looked over his shoulder at the patrolman, still engrossed in whatever Mack was telling him, before looking back at his men. “Pulling up cones? What do you mean, ‘pulling up cones?’
Gomer started to squirm under the intensity of Ted’s gaze. “Mack told us to do it.”
After casting a fresh glance over his shoulder, Ted said: “What were his exact instructions?”
The little Mexican looked at his feet, and Gomer appeared ready to hyperventilate. The driver said: “He just said we scrubbed the paving, and told us to go pick up the cones. That was it.” Gomer, showing obvious relief that his coworker had answered, gave a spastic nod.
“Shit.” Ted took off his hard hat and rubbed his scalp. These were supposedly experienced laborers, dammit. You work in a Union area, the trade-off you get for dealing with their rules and petty garbage was that when you called the Hall, they sent you someone that had experience. How in the hell could Union laborers not know Rule One about pulling cones, delineators, or even K-rail from a traffic closure?
You pull from the work zone out. The first cone a motorist sees as they approach your operation is the last one that you pick up.
They shouldn’t even need experience to know that. A trained friggin’ monkey should be able to figure that out.
He wanted nothing more than to give these three morons the tongue-lashing they deserved. In fact, Ted thought it might feel pretty good to give skeezy ol’ Gomer a good smack in the face.
But the cop would see. Even through the crimson haze of rage that blurred his judgment, Ted realized that would be a bad idea.
What difference did it make now? They were screwed. Some chick rammed herself into their equipment, and these guys turned it into a huge cash payout to whatever family she had. If only these morons had waited five minutes…
If only…
Who says they didn’t?
Somehow ratcheting up the intensity of his stare, Ted asked: “Everything’s back, right?”
Gomer all too eagerly, said: “Oh, yeah! As soon as we heard, yeah, we went back.”
“Did anyone else drive by?”
The driver said no while Gomer turned his frenetic nodding into frenetic head-shaking. Through it all, the Mexican laborer continued to look at the pavement in front of him.
“Then you guys never pulled up any cones.”
The crew looked at each other, Gomer completely failing to grasp what his boss was getting at. “But that’s what we were doing. We had a ten or twelve up when –”
“You weren’t pulling up cones.” The words came out slowly, evenly, more and more in control with each passing second. “Everyone knows that you start at the end away from oncoming traffic, and finish up with your taper. You must have been out making sure everything was in place. Which – it – was! Do I remember right, or would one of you rather tell that cop you killed that girl?”
Gomer looked ready to piss all over himself. Stammering, he assured Ted he was on board. O-whatever nodded, a somber look on his face. The Mexican, though. His eyes remained fixed on the road.
Cruz Ibanez, the sticker on his hardhat said. Ted took a couple of steps forward until he was looming over the laborer. “I’m not sure if you heard me or not, Cruz.”
Still refusing to look up, he replied: “I heard you.” It sounded more like I hurr yoo. “I just don’t understand why we can’t just say what happened. She was driving too fast. It didn’t matter what we were doing.”
Ted managed to let the little guy finish his sentence without jumping on him. The cop was still back there, and now it was more than just a possible assault charge at stake if he hit anybody. He squatted down to meet his laborer’s eyes. “Tell you what. I got two guys who seem to remember pretty clearly, and I don’t see why the cop needs to hear the same story three times. More importantly, I don’t think you habla ingles so good. I really couldn’t understand what you said just now.”
He straightened up, looked the other two in the eye, and reminded them that they hadn’t touched the cones, they were just checking up on the signs.
Down the hill, the patrolman shook hands with Mack and turned toward them. Gomer quietly said: “it’s showtime!” and rubbed his hands together like he was preparing to catch something heavy.
As the cop asked his questions, Ted stood by his men, trying to look like he was there for moral support. The driver and Gomer parroted the same story. The cop looked bored with the repeat information and didn’t look up from his notepad as they talked. If he had, he would have noticed Gomer blinking rapidly, and O-something nervously rubbing his left arm with his right.
The officer next asked Cruz what he’d seen. Ted stepped forward and butted in before the question was fully out of the guy’s mouth.
“His English isn’t good. Our foremen know Spanish, so it’s not usually a big deal.”
“Oh,” said the patrolman, “that’s all right. You can’t do the job in this state anymore without getting fluent.”
Ted’s stomach turned to ice as the two conversed for a minute, the patrolman slowly and Cruz rapidly. The cop furrowed his brow as he listened, and grunted as he turned to face Ted.
Oh shit, thought Ted, if that little spic just sold me out, he’s gonna –
“That gentleman tells me,” said the patrolman in that parental tone cops get when they pull you over, “that you’ve been letting him ride in the back of that truck.”
Ted’s brain lurched forward for a moment. “Oh. Oh! I’m sorry, officer. That’s against our company policy. If my Foreman’s been letting him do that, I’ll put a stop to it.”
“If I’m driving this stretch of highway,” said the cop, “and see another guy in the back of a pickup, I’ll ticket the passenger, the driver, and you. And then I’ll report it to OSHA.”
Ted thanked him for giving him a chance to correct it, assured him it would never happen again, and then it was all over.
Ted thought about clapping the cop on the back and walking him back to the cruiser, but settled for just shaking hands. As he turned to rejoin Mack for a talk about what it would take to fix the paver, he shot a withering look back at Cruz, but it was wasted. The little Mexican’s head was bowed as he studied at the tiny pieces of gravel forever entombed in black tar under his feet.
3
It wasn’t the third failed attempt to reach his daughter that made Carl get good and cranked up on screwdrivers. It was the TV. Behind the Music, the VH1 show that followed famous musicians through their (always difficult and checkered) path to and through stardom, featured Metallica. In one of the many old photos that flashed onscreen as a clip of For Whom the Bell Tolls played in the background, Carl saw himself.
It had been a big night, maybe the biggest for Carl and the other members of his band, Brock Hedd. Metallica had come back down from the Bay Area, where they’d earned a devout following and record deal, and they needed a local opening act that could draw but wasn’t yet committed to a label. It was a huge show, with easily a couple hundred sweaty, angry teens bouncing off each other in the smoky hall, and Carl in particular had been on fire, able to coax squeals and runs out of his Les Paul that he’d never heard before. Brock Hedd turned the stage over, with the most jacked-up crowd he’d seen.
And after the headlining set (which completely killed), Carl found himself on a moldy green couch between James Hetfield and Dave Mustaine, taking turns with a bottle of JD and shooting the breeze. For all their reputations as assholes, Carl had found the two immensely entertaining. Mustaine, in particular, threw insults around with more creativity and comedic timing than Don Rickles.
Carl didn’t have as negative of a reputation, though hot-head and redass were terms people used to describe him. Carl smashed guitars on stage, and a couple of faces offstage. Both of them had deserved it, of course; they were drunk and obnoxious. When Carl got drunk, he mellowed out. His bandmates began putting a couple of shots in him before they went out, and kept him supplied with maintenance beers through each set.
On the TV, VH1 had gotten a hold of a Polaroid image of Hetfield killing the first whiskey bottle, while through the loop made by his arm, a blurry Carl cracked another one open. That had been a blurry night. The boys, flush with receipts from earlier stops on their tour, had made sure a whole case of the stuff was waiting in the dressing room.
That night, Carl knew he was on the verge of greatness. Everybody else was getting snapped up by the big boys; even Quiet Riot, after losing Randy Rhoads to Ozzy, managed to plug in one of Carl’s buddies and have a big hit.
Carl had said no when they’d asked him if he wanted to try out for Randy’s vacant spot. He knew Brock Hedd would be a sure thing, and didn’t want to screw it up.
Partly in memory of how good it felt to get all-out blitzed on that night, and partly in memory of how bad it sucked to realize the window had closed on Brock Hedd, and his neck was in the opening, Carl plowed through a couple of screwdrivers, skipped the orange juice on the third and fourth, and finally, after channel-surfing in an unsuccessful hunt for an upbeat show, passed out mid-morning in his smelly old easy chair.
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Ted was confident the cop had bought in and that the girl in the Ford wasn’t important enough for the media to get too nosy. But the company would still make a big deal about it. They had to; if the victim had any family, some back-of-the-phone-book cockroach would convince them to sue for millions.
He climbed into his pickup and called headquarters in Fontana before anyone else could. The last thing you wanted to happen in any crisis was to have your boss hear about it before you had a chance to tell him. It was a little like being a kid, making sure he got to his mom first when he hit his sister and she started hollering about it.
He called and a matronly contralto voice said: “Tolbert Brothers how can I help you?” It was a greeting repeated hundreds of times a day by the lady up front, Glenda or Glinda or something like that.
Can you make a traffic fatality go away? Ted wanted to feel bad for the girl in the Ford; she was awfully young to have it all ended so abruptly, but empathy was something he knew other people had for each other, not something he actually had in him. The pain in the ass her death had created served to crush any feelings of sympathy under its heavy boot. Why couldn’t she just have veered off the road on that curve a mile further up?
“It’s Bosworth at Lamb Canyon. I need to get a hold of Mike.”
“Stevens or Lanton?”
You gotta be frikkin’ kidding me, Toots, he wanted to say. Mike Lanton was the marketing guy and had absolutely nothing to do with getting real work done. But the last thing he needed with this albatross around his neck was to get the lady up front mad. So he did his best to say “Stevens” without sounding too gruff.
“Thankyou I’ll connectyou” came the run-on response, and there were a couple of clicks, followed by an interminable series of ring tones coming from the other end of the line. After half a minute of this, there was another click, followed by the same voice: “Tolbert Brothers how can I help you?”
Ted barely restrained an urge to put his left elbow through the drivers-side window of his pickup. “I was holding for Mike Stevens?”
“Oh.” Now a little fluster broke the pattern of run-on, thoughtless speech. “I, uh, I don’t think he’s scheduled to be anywhere today … I’ll give him a page.”
Another click, another series of rings, and the call was finally picked up.
“Hello, this is Mike.”
“Yeah, Ted.”
Something in Bosworth’s tone stopped his boss from going into the usual half-minute of pleasantries. “What’s up?”
After letting out a heavy sigh to show how much this tragedy affected him as a human, Ted said: “We had a third-party fatality today.”
He heard a harsh, quiet swear on the other end of the line. “How many?”
“Just one, and luckily she was by herself. Ran through our cones for some reason and hit the back of our paver.”
If it were Ted in the General Superintendent’s chair, the first question might have been something about the condition of the paver. But Mike Stevens was a decent guy with a sixteen-year-old daughter. “Did the EMT’s have anything to work with, or was it pretty much instant?”
“They said she wasn’t wearing a seat belt and, yeah, she wouldn’t have had time to feel it.”
“Anyone on the paver?”
“No, we were getting some rain up here, so we were starting to pack it in. The operator was in the port-a-pot when it happened, so he heard it but didn’t see.”
“Well, alright, at least that’s something. You get a copy of a police report?”
“CHP was here, but the guy told me they don’t pass ‘em out for fatalities until they’re finalized. They said forty-eight hours and I’d be able to pick it up from their station in Beaumont.”
“Alright. Shut the job down, if you haven’t yet. You’ll need to have a mass safety meeting tomorrow about it. How about your TCD logs? You have pictures of the setup?”
Ted had to admit he didn’t. It was hard for him to be shown he couldn’t be perfect on everything. Especially something that until this morning had seemed like such a waste of time and paper, tedious crap that could wait until things slowed down or Fontana gave him that extra Engineer he’d been working Mike for.
Mike cursed once more on the other end of the line, and then set his phone down as he went down the hall to get Andy Franklin, the Company Safety Manager, so they could both ask the same questions again on the speakerphone. The whole ordeal lasted another thirty minutes before they let him go.
<+>
The TV was still on. Carl wasn’t sure when he’d nodded off, but his thick tongue, headache, and leaden joints quickly reminded him why. It was on some daytime crap; a mullet-headed string bean of a guy and his hairy schlub of a wife yelled at each other while a crowd egged them on. The shrill voices jabbed into his skull at his temples.
There was a knock at the door. It was urgent, second-notice rapping; he must have been roused from his pass-out by the first round. It was followed by a male voice: “Mister Patterson?”
Careful to resist the urge to shake his head, Carl plowed through the muddy wads of memory that sloshed around in his mind. Did he owe anybody money? Was there a warrant out for him? He couldn’t remember anything. Reluctantly, he rose from his chair and took several lurching steps to the peephole set in his door.
It was a pair of cops.
Carl had considered yelling just a minute or something like that, but his ex-con’s instinct shut him up. He tried harder to extract some memory of wrongdoing more than several years old, even a parking ticket. Nothing came to mind.
Another set of loud, purposeful raps exploded through the door, now only a few inches from his throbbing head, followed by another use of his name.
If they have a warrant they’ll bust in. If they don’t, they can’t do any more than talk.
He opened the door.
They weren’t city cops, but wore tan shirts with multi-pointed stars above the left pocket. The knocker, a large black guy in his forties, inquired: “Carl Patterson?”
He nodded, full of mistrust.
“Can we come in?”
“Do you have a warrant?”
That took the guy aback for a second, and he involuntarily leaned over and looked into the darkened apartment behind Carl before answering. “It’s not like that, Mister Patterson. Are you the father of Allison Gomez? The computer fetched your name from her birth certificate.” To reinforce the point, he held up a sheet of paper with a black-and-white photo.
“Uh, yeah. Is she in some kind of trouble?”
The other cop was much younger, and stood well behind the old one. At Carl’s question, he suddenly looked down the walkway and shifted nervously.
“Can we come in to talk about it?”
A minute later, the cops were seated. Carl was bent forward in his chair, the old, comfortable, wretched-smelling fartcatcher that he’d just spent a few hours pass-out drunk in, his head buried in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably. The grief ignited an explosion of guilt over hurting her, over being a worthless drunk of a father who tried to reconcile too late, and now never would. He moaned at the floor, clawing at his hair, unable to see more than flickering patterns of light as tears spattered on the stained brown carpet.
The cops let him cry it out; it was obvious the black one had done this sort of thing more than once. Probably brought the young guy along to see how it was done, hoping he could find some other poor bastard who could go to people’s homes and tell them their kids were dead. He asked if Carl would be okay. Asked if he needed any counseling, then gave him a business card to go along with that. After all that was out, and Carl looked like he’d gotten himself together, the cop asked if he would be able to accompany them to make a positive identification.
Carl went with them to begin the worst afternoon and evening of his life.
4
“You’re staying behind to go through all the cones, signs, and the type twos,” said Ted. “Wipe off all the reflective stuff. Fix everything that’s worth fixing, and shitcan the stuff that isn’t. Oh, and swap out all the batteries on the flashers that need ‘em.”
Ted saw Gomer give a longing look at the other workers climbing into their cars.
“Something you needed to ask, Randy?”
The skeezy laborer looked back, met his boss’s stare, and immediately got interested in putting on his gloves.
Ted hung around for a couple of minutes to watch the three-man crew unload signs from the back of their truck. They worked without the usual banter they usually threw back and forth, with more speed than they would have unsupervised.
While it was true that this stuff needed to get done, Ted was normally loath to pay the extra wages it took to keep signs, cones, and barricades in good condition. But the accident was going to mean visitors. OSHA would want to assure themselves he wasn’t endangering workers. The bigwigs from Fontana would also drop by for an interrogation and inspection. Best to have everything traffic-related in top shape.
More importantly, Ted wanted to maximize the amount of time these three spent where he could see them. He’d have to let them go after eight or nine hours, but if he stuck more time between when they played their part in the accident and when they went home to whatever it was they went home to…
“You guys cool?”
They all looked up from what they were doing, even Cruz. After an uncomfortable beat, O-something - Oscar, his name is Oscar, you gotta remember that, Teddy - said: “Yeah. It’ll be okay.”
“That’s right,” said Ted, looking mainly at Cruz, the weakest link in this little chain of trust, “it’ll all be okay. Y’know, cones or no cones, anybody should have been able to see that paver.”
“Yeah,” said Gomer, a little too enthusiastically, “anybody. She was probably hopped up on something.”
“Easy there, chief. We can’t go speculating like that. My point is: it doesn’t matter. Just one of those fucked-up deals that come along every now and then.”
Ted let them move some more signs around for a minute or two, then said: “Just thought of something. You guys married? Girlfriends?”
“Me and Cruz,” said Oscar. “Randy’s got an ex.”
“Not me. I’ve always been, uh, sorta married to my work. Dated around, but at the first sign of ‘where is this thing headed’, I’m out. But I could see you guys wanting to talk this over with something soft, warm, and understanding back home.”
Oscar tried to exchange looks with Cruz, but the little guy wasn’t going to let his eyes anywhere outside of a six-foot circle of ground at his feet.
“I’m just sayin’, I get why you’d want to share at home. But really, guys: It ain’t a good idea. The girl’s staying dead. Talking to anyone about the cones won’t help her. And it will make things bad for us.”
None of the laborers replied, and for a few seconds the only sound was the revving of a distant truck engine and the patter of drizzle on the signs.
Ted dipped his head toward the most concerning of the three. “You do, uh, com-prenday what I’m getting at, Cruz? You being quiet makes me start to think-”
“I got it,” said Cruz. The look he gave Ted was one of a peasant to his landlord, of someone who knew his place.
“I get that you feel bad about it, Cruz. And, really, that’s fine. But don’t let that bad feeling make you do something we’ll all end up regretting.”
Message delivered, he turned and walked back to the office. It was a double-wide trailer, with wood-paneled walls and linoleum floors. There were two doors, each with a set of metal stairs leading up to them.
As he mounted the stairs, Ted took one last look at the three laborers moving signs. Even though he was out of earshot, they chose to remain silent.
I’m gonna have to separate Cruz from the other two, before he rubs off on them.
Ted opened the trailer door and stepped in. His boots clomped on the linoleum-square floor; from behind a battered Steelcase desk, Neal Jackson bolted the last corner of a sandwich and folded a potato-chip bag back into his igloo cooler.
Neal was the Job Engineer, the junior salaried employee on the job, in charge of doing whatever the hell Ted told him to do. He was an energetic kid, two years out of college, eager to learn. A lot of the young guys annoyed Bosworth, but Neal was different. He was able to listen to a whole sentence before asking an ignorant question, which he’d only have to ask once. And when Ted told him to do something, but didn’t hold his hand through the entire task, Neal wasn’t a victim of second-guessing himself into inaction. He made mistakes, but wasn’t afraid of making them, and usually didn’t make them twice.
And now, thankfully, his mouth was still working on the sandwich. He couldn’t hit his boss with a barrage of crap the second he set foot in the door.
Ted drew a cone-cup of water from the cooler and downed it, then sat at Mack’s desk, which the foreman barely used. “Bitch of a day, I can tell you that right now.”
Neal nodded, and took a big swallow of Mountain Dew to wash the rest of his lunch down. “I can imagine. So is everything cleaned up?”
“Clean as it’s getting. We had to drag the paver off the road. Last thing I need is somebody from the newspaper driving by with a camera.”
“Oh, yeah. I got a few calls. Lemme see, the Press-Enterprise and KNX called.”
Ted stiffened and leaned forward. “What did you tell them?”
Apparently unconcerned about setting his boss off, the engineer held up a finger in a hold up a second sign as he drained his drink.
Man, but the kid has self-confidence; almost as much as I did at that age.
Neal tossed the empty can into the trash. “I told them everything I knew, which was nothing. I said someone had to stay behind in the trailer and answer phones, and I was that guy. Then I remembered what they told me in our engineer’s seminar last month: If the press calls, direct them to Andrew Franklin in Fontana.”
Franklin was the guy Tolbert designated to talk to the press. He wouldn’t offer a brusque ‘no comment’, like Ted would have, but would give them some statement about how, despite the dedication Tolbert Brothers Company had to safety and training in the right procedures, an inattentive motorist was fatally injured on their worksite. He’d work in the statistic that twelve Californians a day were fatally injured on the highway. Franklin was a master at putting the right words in their optimal place, and not sticking his foot in his mouth.
Good. Let the slick guy handle the barracudas, then.
“Okay. Thanks for handling the phones. Tell you what: Why don’t you grab the camera and go drive up and down the route and take a bunch of pictures? Make sure you show how this road is treacherous with or without cones up. After all, there’s a reason we’re working here.”
The young guy could have asked why, but didn’t. He shoved the igloo under his desk and did as he was told.
<+>
Randy was the first one to start gabbing. He couldn’t help it; he was a people person. If he’d been made with a more generous allocation of intelligence, he’d be a successful sales rep or PR officer. With even one positive trait, or even an upbeat outlook on life, he could have been able to amass an impressive collection of friends.
But Randy’s curse was that, despite the fact he had nothing to say that anyone wanted to hear, he needed conversation.
That’s why, three minutes after Ted returned to the office trailer, he said: “You think Bosworth’s a little over the top with all the secret-agent shit?”
Cruz kept moving stuff around wordlessly. He was no fun, and hardly ever answered when you talked to him. Randy wondered exactly how much English he actually knew.
Oscar, on the other hand, was less able to ignore a question. “I don’t know, Randy. I think I’m a little worried that someone might talk.”
“So what? It’s not like we’d go to jail or anything. It’s Bosworth’s job, he’d be the one-”
“I ain’t exactly gonna run around blabbing about it to everyone, just to prove you right. I think we all just can it and move on. Bosworth was right when he said we can’t bring her back to life. We can’t.”
“Well…” Randy stumbled on a series of conflicting thoughts before blurting: “I ain’t sayin’ nothing. I just don’t like the idea of Bosworth telling us what we should or shouldn’t do, is all.”
“He’s trying to keep us all out of trouble,” said Oscar. He stopped what he was doing and looked past Randy. “You get that, right, Cruz? You ain’t gonna be causing any trouble, are you? You’ve been awful quiet about this whole thing.”
Cruz looked at Oscar, then at the trailer where Bosworth had gone. Returning his eyes to his coworkers, he shrugged. “I don’ want no trouble. I’m jus… it’s gonna be on my min’ for a while. I really feel bad.”
“Yeah, we all do,” said Randy, who didn’t feel very bad at all. “Just don’t say nothing and it’ll all blow over.” He dropped the sign he was carrying into a rack by their truck. “How much longer we gotta work? Everyone else got to go home.”
Oscar huffed in exasperation. “You’re gettin’ paid, so quit bitching.”
Under his breath, Randy muttered: “Not gettin’ paid enough. Now that me and Bosworth are buddies, he oughta keep that in mind.”
5
Carl woke up on the couch, disoriented. He’d managed to fall asleep over the din of the TV, and it was still there, faithfully flickering with images of the outside world until its master was willing to resume watching.
His head hurt and his tongue had become a wad of cotton jammed against his palate. Hardly the first time he’d woken like this, especially since trying to reconcile with Ally …
It caught him with a hammer blow to the chest. There would be no reconciling with Ally. For a perverse second, he wondered why the nightmare he’d just had came from her childhood, and not her pale, lifeless body, coarsely stitched up and lying in a morgue drawer, with her head shape out of true.
As badly as he needed a drink to focus and put a little distance from his pain, he forced himself to shamble into the kitchen and fiddle with the coffee maker. It would be bad enough to meet with the funeral home while hung over. He didn’t need to make it worse with booze-breath. He smelled bad enough as it was, and would need to shower the sour reek of metabolized and sweated ethanol off his skin.
Carl threw some bread in the toaster and managed to find a banana that wasn’t too soft and blotchy. His mind wandered as the food hit his mouth, its flavor wasted on his battered taste buds. Seeing nothing of interest on the bare walls around his table, he turned sideways in his chair to study the coarse brown carpet.
The phone rang, linking his temples in a circuit of sizzling pain. It jarred Carl enough that he dropped his food, and as he hopped up and reached for the phone, he sent a Dixie cup full of spare change clattering to the floor.
“Mister Patterson?”
He looked through his kitchen window at the too-bright sky. “Yeah.”
“My name is Matt Hauptman, of Thomas and Hauptman. I’m sorry to disturb you at a time like this, but I wanted to reach out to you before someone else does. Someone who doesn’t have your best interests in mind.”
“Such as?” Thomas and Hauptman … where have I heard that name before?
“Mister Patterson, has anyone from Tolbert Brothers tried to reach you?”
“No.” Carl had never heard of Tolbert anything, and wondered if this Hauptman had reached the wrong Carl Patterson.
“Good. They’re the ones responsible for your daughter’s tragedy. They may try to contact you, while you’re still overwhelmed, and offer you cash in exchange for you to go away. And we don’t feel that you deserve to be treated like that. We feel …”
“Wait a minute! Thomas and … you guys are the ones on the back of the phone book, aren’t you?”
“Ah, yes, so certainly you’re aware, then, that you’ll be represented by a well established firm of utmost rep –“
“Hold up, chappy. I’m not so sure that I need a bunch of ambulance chasers –”
“Mister Patterson: I can assure you that we’re calling because, all too often, we see these big businesses get off lightly for their negligence. Are you aware that Tolbert Brothers is one of the most profitable in the business?”
“Look, I’m not interested. You think I want to trade my daughter for money? I know I don’t have much, but I’m not about to look into making a buck off her…“ Carl couldn’t say death, not so soon.
“The fact that you feel that way speaks of deep integrity, Mister Patterson, and I understand your grief at this most difficult time. Please, later on, when you’ve had a moment to think it over, do give me a-”
Carl hung up on the man. There was a swirl of revulsion in his stomach, and his pulse had become an all-body thudding. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, his temples began to throb in unison.
The world would be so much nicer without cockroaches running around and suing everybody.
Suddenly, Carl wasn’t very hungry anymore.
He walked to the cabinet to the left of the sink; the one that housed glasses on one shelf and bottles on the other. They bristled in there, different heights, shapes, and colors. Carl liked variety, and back when he still talked to people about drinking, he’d say things like: ‘it feels like it’s gonna be a Tanqueray and tonic night’ or ‘I’m feelin’ all amaretto-y’.
Good old all-purpose vodka, occupying its familiar place front and center, was a proven morning hangover killer. Since he’d come back to California, a screwdriver had been helping Carl greet the day at least three times a week.
On autopilot, Carl’s hands happily splashed orange juice into a fresh glass and dug some ice cubes out of the freezer. Hauptman’s slick tone, his rhetoric about big business squashing the little guy; all of it made him want to slug the bastard.
The problem was: some of it had made sense.
Well, Carl Patterson may be a worthless drunk with an employer that could only afford to pay him to work every other week, but he at least wasn’t some white trash asshole that looked to get rich quick from a lawsuit.
He took a drink from the glass, and the sweet, acidic bite helped him focus his mind. Carl looked at it… something didn’t taste quite right. Then his eyes went back to the cabinet, and he realized he hadn’t put the vodka in.
Carl pictured himself in a conversation with nobody in particular, saying: “I stopped drinking when I lost my daughter.”
He looked back at the glass again, and took another drink of the unadulterated orange juice.
There had been times when Carl had tried before. Usually his body wasn’t the weak link; he’d get sick while de-toxing, but not intolerably so. His problem was that he’d been so conditioned to certain activities going well with a drink that he was no longer sure how they could be done without one.
“For now”, he said to the empty apartment, “you’re not drinking. Let’s just not drink for a while. See how long you can go.”
He wasn’t sure if the curtains on the front window to his apartment actually worked anymore, but he managed over the next fifteen minutes to get them opened. He managed to do it without getting a drink.
<+>
In the worst way, Ted wanted to tell Neal the K-Rail was killing him. The estimate had money for the three-foot high by twenty-foot long concrete barriers; someone in Fontana had seen the need to physically separate live traffic from the work zone. But Ted had bullied the State’s inspector into allowing cones for short, quick paving pulls, and had saved a ton of cost.
He knew if he bitched about spending the money now, he’d look like he didn’t care whether or not somebody else died. Completely missing from his train of thought was that if they’d had even four sections of K-rail up in their closure, Allison Gomez’s little Ford Focus would have hit it at an oblique angle. It would have caused a hell of a lot of damage, and maybe even rendered the little car undriveable, but she would have walked away.
Ted watched a twenty-foot long, twenty-ton front-end loader slip its forks under another section of rail. With his arms crossed and his eyes not leaving the operation, he asked: “Alright, genius, how much is this operation costing?”
Neal, familiar with Ted’s know your money attitude, was ready. “Let’s see: We’re getting ten loads of rail, and Paul’s taking about a minute and a half per section, which means eighteen minutes a load, or three an hour, so round up and call it three point five hours… Paul, the loader, and the laborer are about one-fifty an hour, so it’s a little over five hundred.”
“Hrmph.” Ted nodded agreement. He’d not known - or cared - that the operator’s name was Paul. “And the trucking?”
“Oh, eighty an hour, times a two-hour round trip, times ten loads… sixteen hundred.”
The superintendent nodded, and said: “Guts, feathers, and all, a little over two grand. If that was coming out of your own pocket, I’d bet you could figure out how to shave a few bucks off.” He pointed to the loader as it backed away from the truck. “See how he’s turning after he stops? If he turned while he was moving, that’d save five seconds a cycle. Run that out times all the sections and he’d save six minutes.”
“Fifteen bucks,” said Neal.
“How much beer could you buy on fifteen bucks? Especially that watered-down horse piss you young guys drink.”
Ted was all about shaving dollars here and there. Take care of the small stuff, and the big stuff would take care of itself. Somebody famous had probably said it first, but ignorance to the quote’s origin didn’t mean Ted couldn’t live by it.
Every now and then, the big stuff might blow up. The prior day’s fatality wiped out the savings from going cheap with the barriers, but Ted looked at construction as a series of gambles. Managers that took the right risks made the money. That’s what he loved about Tolbert: the big multinational corporations usually got themselves fat on government cost-plus work. While it was low-risk, the profit margins were lower, and the potential for that sweet mixture of lowered cost and raised revenue was nonexistent.
So, yeah… working in live traffic is a risk. And it’s not a true risk unless things come up snake eyes from time to time.
Real leaders, thought Ted, defined themselves in times like these. So he’d dedicated himself into getting back up and running as quickly as possible.
Neal asked: “Why did you want to swap out the paver with El Centro? Ours will be fixed by Saturday.”
If the wrong guy had asked the question, Ted would have verbally kicked his ass. But Neal was worth teaching.
“Look up,” said Ted.
The younger man did so. “It’s nice out today.”
“Yep. And we’re not getting anything done. Who knows what the weather will be like next month? Who knows if CalTrans will run out of funding and pull the plug on this job before we can make back what we lost this week? Does the company stop paying our salaries, or all that other weekly cost stuff? I don’t want to stand out here a couple months from now saying ‘man, I wish we’d have gotten back to work sooner when the weather was nice.’ You understand?”
“Yeah.”
Something about the response didn’t give Ted a ‘fully bought in’ vibe. “What?”
Neal looked down. “Nothing.”
“No, really: what? You won’t get very far in this industry by avoiding arguments. The ones that get ahead are the ones that get stuff out in the open right away. So … what?”
The young engineer sighed. “I dunno. The girl hasn’t even had her funeral yet. It just feels like we’re supposed to give it a little more time.”
Ted found Neal’s use of ‘the girl’ to describe a woman only three or four years younger than him a little amusing. “I’m sure a lot of the guys feel the same way. But we need to get people’s minds occupied with what’s ahead, not what’s behind. You’ll see: by this time next week, we’ll all be better off.”
6
Carl’s eyes finally grew heavy as a local newsman read through the top stories. He didn’t watch the news very often and hoped it would bore him into drowsiness. As long as there wasn’t a report on Tolbert Brothers or traffic accidents - and, for L.A. news to report a traffic accident, it had better involve at least a dozen vehicles, a gorilla escaped from the zoo, and Paris Hilton - he’d find it mundane and boring.
Earlier that evening, Carl had realized that if he was going to be serious about this whole ‘not drinking’ thing, he’d better find a way to make sure he could go to sleep at night. Booze had been his lullaby and teddy bear for so long, his body would be screaming for it once the sun went down.
Long ago, he’d had Jenny to help him get to sleep. She liked staying up late, and her odd shifts as a waitress let her sleep in. If the pressures of work were spinning around his head and he couldn’t drift off, Carl would leave the bedroom and find her on the couch, watching TV. He’d lie down, putting his head on her thigh, and she’d watch TV while scratching his back.
She’d been a good, loving wife. Things at work clouded Carl’s perspective at the time, but looking back now he could recognize that. Their fights were usually over money - which, after another five years at the firm where he was employed, wouldn’t have been a worry - or about how much time he’d spent at work.
Carl usually drank instead of wondering what life would have been like if he’d kept his briefcase in the car instead of taking in on the night it all went wrong. It was painful territory, and there was no way he could go back and fix it. Would they have had more kids? Would he, being predisposed, have ended up an alcoholic anyway?
The Dramamine were kicking in. He’d taken three pills, even though the directions recommended two. An early-evening hunt through the local drugstore (not Ralph’s, with its all too familiar Liquor section) had yielded the air-sickness pills. He’d initially grabbed some NyQuil, but a quick read of the label showed him alcohol was a key ingredient. Then he’d remembered back to his younger days, when the firm had him fly places, and his midair queasiness had led him to the Dramamine. They didn’t seem to do anything for his sickness, but at least made him sleep through it.