Chapter 11
PATRICK
THE HAMMER I'M holding has never hit a nail.
I know this because I've been holding it for forty minutes, and every time I move toward an actual task, a woman in a headset repositions me in front of a different semi torn-down wall.
"Great," she says, walking backward with her hands framed like a director. "Now hand it to Wallace. Slower. Like it means something."
Across the stud wall, Wall accepts my hammer like it means something. We have now exchanged the same hammer eleven times, and neither of us has been permitted to use it.
"Is anyone going to actually build anything?" I ask a few minutes later.
The PR lead lowers her hands and glances around, then lowers her voice and gives me honesty.
"The contractors start on Thursday. They're licensed and insured and none of them are famous.
You lot swinging hammers raises more money than the hammers will ever earn back in labor.
" She taps her clipboard. "Half construction site, half a television studio. You're mostly in the studio half."
I can respect that. I adjust my grip on the prop hammer and once again hand it to Wall like it means something.
His fingers brush mine on the handle, his face giving the camera nothing while he does it.
The Milwaukee shelter is a gutted warehouse two blocks off the river, currently containing both full rosters, a content crew, a forest of kennel parts and two grandmothers.
The Wolves arrived this morning like they were annexing the building.
Within an hour they'd colonized the far wall, demolished another, established a paint operation, and built a snack table that Snooze is asleep under.
Nobody seems alarmed. I'm coming to understand that on that team, chaos is an extra player.
My team is quieter about its misconduct. The rookies are painting a mural of a dog that's developing some anatomical problems, and Dziedzic brought his label maker. To a construction site. Slash studio. He's already labeled three bins, a ladder, and the audio technician's coffee.
The grandmothers concern me most.
Mama Paws arrived with the Chicago caravan, wearing a hard hat with paw print stickers on it.
The Milwaukee shelter's matriarch, a short-haired woman named Wanda who everyone under sixty is required to call Nana, met her at the door.
They looked at each other for five full seconds, the way captains do at center ice.
Then they merged.
By ten a.m. they share one clipboard and finish each other's sentences.
By eleven they've reorganized the campaign's shot list by deploying players according to a cuteness algorithm only they understand.
I personally watched Wanda evaluate Lindqvist, say "too calm, people will think the dogs are boring," and reassign him to lifting things in the background.
Groover got promoted to puppy duty on the grounds that he, and I quote, photographs sad.
Somewhere behind me, a familiar voice announces itself to the room. "Today my word is liability."
Petrov stands beside the ladder wearing a purple hard hat, holding his phone up like a proclamation. "A person or thing that causes you problem. Example sentence." He looks around, selects Becker. "You."
"Correct usage," Wall says from the top of a ladder, without turning around.
Petrov pockets the phone and picks up a coil of roofing felt. "Now I go up."
Three Wolves materialize around him like a special-teams unit. Groover takes the roofing felt. Ace takes the staple gun Petrov had somehow acquired. Hammer just stands in front of the ladder with his arms crossed.
"It happened before," Jinx says to me, and walks away.
I decide not to probe, for my own sanity.
Twenty minutes later, Dziedzic drifts past Petrov and applies a label to his hard hat without breaking stride. The label says LIABILITY. Petrov wears it for the rest of the day with visible pride.
***
THE AUDIO TECH flags me down before lunch, holding up his tablet. "Your pack died an hour ago. Battery. I'll swap it when we break."
I shrug. "No rush."
"You're the only one not saying anything interesting anyway." He scrolls. "Someone on this feed keeps whispering about perimeters."
I could tell him which channel to check. I've been watching the situation develop for ten minutes.
It started, as most things on this site have, with content.
Becker's podcast needed a thumbnail. The concept, as far as I could reconstruct it from across the room was, Becker in a hard hat, one foster cat on his shoulder, caption to be determined.
The shelter's foster program had exactly one cat on the premises today, a long orange thing named Gary, and the only person Gary tolerated holding him turned out to be Theo.
This surprised nobody. Animals treat Theo like one of their own. Which, honestly, he might be.
So Theo held Gary, and Becker adjusted his hard hat, and Theo art-directed with the hand that wasn't full of cat, and somewhere between "lift your chin" and "no, heroically," Gary poured himself out of Theo's arm like water finding a drain and was gone.
I watched all of it happen and I said nothing, because my mic was dead. And also because I wanted to see where this was going.
What they did was approach me, together, wearing the matching neutral faces of two men who have rehearsed being calm.
"No," I said.
Becker scoffed. "We haven't said anything."
"No."
"Patrick." Theo stepped closer, dropping his voice. "We need a supervisor. Someone with authority. Someone the grandmothers trust."
"You lost the cat."
"We misplaced a cat," Becker corrected. "Briefly. Locally. He's contained by the building."
"Probably," Theo said.
"Probably contained by the building."
The correct move was to walk twenty feet in any direction and inform Wanda.
The correct move died quietly, because Becker said, "If the content crew finds out, it's a segment.
" He's right. Five cameras, both teams miked for content, one missing shelter animal at a shelter fundraiser. That's a headline with legs.
Which is how I’ve now ended up coordinating a covert search operation with a dead microphone and two of the least covert men in the sport.
They are catastrophic at it.
Theo commando-crawls behind the kennel row to avoid a camera pan, which attracts the camera instantly, because nothing draws a lens like a grown man crawling.
Becker creates what he calls a diversion by loudly interviewing Petrov about roofing, which works too well and nearly puts Petrov back on the ladder.
Their whisper discipline is nonexistent.
Twice I hear Theo's voice drift over the kennels, hissing "flank the water heater," directly into his live mic.
Across the room, the audio tech slowly removes his headphones and stares at the middle distance.
The grandmothers know, of course. They've known longer than I have.
Mama Paws intercepts me by the paint station, tilts her hard hat back, and says, "Looking for something, sweetie?
" with the serene menace of a border agent, and Wanda, beside her, holds up the intake clipboard and taps the line that says GARY, then taps her watch.
They let us keep searching anyway. I believe it's for their own entertainment.
It ends the way I should have known it would.
"He's in the crate," Wall says from the top of his ladder, without turning around, in the tone of a man reporting the time. "Third from the left. Been there an hour."
The search party converges on the finished kennel row. In the third crate from the left, the one I watched Wall assemble this morning, Gary lies curled on a folded hoodie, asleep, tail over his own nose, looking like promotional material.
Wall's hoodie.
"You knew!" Becker says, aiming a paint stirrer at the ladder. "You watched me spiral for an hour."
"You needed the cardio."
"He could've been anywhere! He could've been in a wall!"
"He was never in a wall." Wall comes down the ladder one rung at a time, and stoops to look into the crate.
Gary opens one eye, evaluates him, and goes back to sleep.
"He left Moreau’s shoulder at 11:15, cleared the paint station, tested two crates, and picked the third. " Then, he adds, "I like him."
Begrudgingly, Becker takes his thumbnail photo of the sleeping cat. “I’m captioning it ‘Employee of the month’.”
And I stand there, holding a clipboard I've forgotten about, watching Wall watch the cat.
That's the entire man, in one afternoon.
Six hours on a ladder without one complaint.
A found family orbiting him like he's furniture that dispenses good judgment.
Hendrix spent twenty minutes standing on his head this morning, and Wall let him stay, steady as a statue, wearing a parrot like a crown, until Hendrix got bored and left to threaten the audio tech about tips.
Nothing on this site escaped him. The cat, the cameras, Becker's spiral. Me. He sees everything and says almost none of it. I’ve spent years mistaking that for coldness.
But it isn't coldness, is it? It's attention. He loves watching things.
Our eyes meet for a brief moment. I look away first, which never used to happen.
***
THE DONOR TOUR comes through at three. A few local families, a sponsor rep, a kid in a Vipers jersey who looks at me like I hung the moon and then, disloyally, at Wall like he hung a bigger one.
"Could we get the rivals?" the dad asks, phone already up. "You know. The glare."
We know the glare. We assemble it. Wall looks down at me by three inches, and I look up at him by the same three, and the kid is delighted, and the phone clicks, and under the noise, barely moving his mouth, Wall whispers, "Your boyfriend isn’t the best pet-sitter, huh?"
"He's not my—"
I stop it there.