Section Loss
The county office is on the fourth floor of a building downtown with windows that do not open and a carpet the color of wet cardboard, and I got there at one o’clock with my eyes swollen and told everybody it was the wind on the truss, and everybody believed me because everybody wanted to.
I wrote the Fortieth Street report between one and six.
I put a three.
Then I wrote eleven pages of narrative that nobody would read and attached forty-two photographs that somebody would, and I uploaded the ultrasonic readings, all nine of them, including the one that came back at thirty-one percent, and I flagged the structure as fracture critical because the lower chord in a two truss bridge has no second path, and then I sat there with my finger over the submit key for about a minute and a half.
Not because I doubted it. Because I knew exactly what the next four months of my life were going to be.
I hit submit at six oh four.
The district engineer called me at six eleven, which meant she had a flag set on my name, which is its own kind of compliment.
“Vera. Talk to me about the three.”
“Thirty-one percent of nominal at the second panel point, north truss. Pack rust jacking the connection. I put a pick through the gusset.”
“You put a pick through it.”
“Four pounds of hand pressure. I have the photograph of the pick in the hole and the photograph of the hole after I took it out.”
She was quiet for a second. “You know what a three does.”
“It posts the bridge at eight tons and starts the clock on a rehab that they have deferred four cycles running.”
“Bergstrom is going to call me.”
“Bergstrom can come out and stand on it,” I said. “I will hold his coat.”
She sighed. Then she said, “Send me the raw readings,” which is how a good manager says thank you.
I sat in the empty office after and looked at my own reflection in the window that does not open, which is not a thing I recommend doing at six thirty on a February night eight days into the worst month of your life.
There was a knock on the frame.
“They said you were the last one up here,” Owen Ferreira said. “I have your pier report. I could have emailed it. I did not want to email it.”
He was in a canvas jacket and jeans and he had his hair dry for once, dark and going gray at the sides, and he was holding a folder like a man delivering bad news to a family.
“Show me,” I said.
He came in and spread it on the desk. Underwater photographs are a strange thing to look at.
Everything is green and close and there is a yard stick in the frame and a hand in a black glove, and it is only when you have looked at forty of them that the shapes resolve into something that used to be a footing.
“The void runs along the upstream face,” he said. “I could get my forearm in at three points. The riprap that was placed in ninety-six is gone. It is downriver somewhere in a pile being useful to fish.”
“How much of the footing is bearing.”
“I would guess two thirds. I do not guess in the report. In the report I say the extent could not be determined by tactile survey, which is the truth and is also the most frustrating sentence in the English language.”
I looked at the photographs for a while.
“You go down there in the dark,” I said. “Forty degree water. Eleven inches of visibility. And what you actually do is put your hands on it.”
“That is the job.”
“How do you stand it.”
He thought about it. He did not do the thing men do where they answer immediately to seem easy.
“You do not get to see it,” he said. “So you have to be all right knowing a thing without seeing it. Some people cannot. They come up and they need to have seen it, and they start filling in the parts they could not touch with what they expect to be there, and that is how you get a bad report.” He shrugged.
“I like it, actually. Down there the only thing that is real is what is under your hand.”
I said, “Huh,” and then I said nothing for long enough that it got strange.
“You have had a week,” he said.
“You do not know me well enough to say that.”
“No,” he agreed, and started stacking the photographs back into the folder. “I have known you for eleven days and four of them were on a job site. That is why I said it. Everybody who has known you longer than that is required to pretend.”
I laughed. It was not a good laugh but it was the first one in eight days that came out of the right part of me.
“You are a strange man, Mr. Ferreira.”
“I am underwater a lot,” he said. “It affects the social skills.”
He left the folder. At the door he stopped and said, “There is a diner on Carson that does an omelet at eleven at night for people who work stupid hours. I am there on Thursdays.” And then, before I could arrange my face, “That was information, not an invitation. Have a good night, Vera.”
And he was gone, and I sat there for a while and thought about a man who is comfortable knowing a thing without seeing it, and about the fact that I had spent my adult life in exactly the opposite discipline.
The house was dark when I got home except the light over the stove.
Cal was not there. His truck was gone. And the kitchen had been cleaned, actually cleaned, the way it gets cleaned twice a year when my mother is coming, with the burner grates soaking in the sink and the top of the refrigerator wiped down.
On the table there was a stack of paper.
It was salvage inventory sheets, the ones from the yard with the printed grid and the columns for item, origin, condition, price. He had turned them over and written on the blank backs in his terrible carpenter’s handwriting, all capitals, pressing hard enough that you could read it from the back.
At the top of the first page it said: EVERY LIE I TOLD YOU. IN ORDER. AS BEST I CAN REMEMBER.
And then it started.
1. MARCH, ELEVEN YEARS AGO. THE REFI PACKET. I TOLD YOU IT WAS THE REFI PACKET.
I put my keys down on the counter and I did not take my coat off.
2. SEPTEMBER, EIGHT YEARS AGO. I SAID THE SHOP MADE MONEY THAT QUARTER. IT DID NOT. BISH COVERED THE INSURANCE.
3. THE WEEK JONAH brOKE HIS WRIST. I WAS NOT AT THE YARD. I WAS AT THE CLUBHOUSE. I DID NOT WANT TO BE AT THE HOSPITAL.
I stood at my own kitchen table with my coat on and I read all of it, and there were forty-one items, which I did not think was on purpose and which I did not think was an accident either, and the last one said:
41. I TOLD YOU SHE WAS ONE TIME. I TOLD YOU IN THIS ROOM WITH THE COFFEE YOU MADE. THAT IS THE ONE I WILL BE SORRY ABOUT ON THE LAST DAY OF MY LIFE.
And under that, not numbered, at the bottom of the page, smaller:
I AM AT THE YARD. I WILL BE AT THE YARD. YOU DO NOT HAVE TO ANSWER THIS. I AM NOT ASKING FOR ANYTHING. I JUST DID NOT WANT THERE TO BE ANYTHING LEFT THAT YOU DID NOT KNOW.
I read the whole stack twice.
Then I got a pen out of the drawer, and I sat down, and on the back of the last page I started making my own list, because he had gotten one thing right, which is that there was still a great deal I did not know.
Item one. What Anthony Pesci’s mother said to me in the hallway.
Item two. What I have never told him.