Tulsa looks out the window of the trailer, and in a quiet moment of reflection, considers the irony that they must dig deep holes to build tall buildings. Right now his construction site looks like a spacious grave with brightly colored rebar caps pointing accusations at the sky. Tulsa didn’t go to college; for him deconstruction is the opposite of what he does all day, so this type of philosophical musing only goes to show how disturbed his mood is right now, just waiting to do what he has to do.
This sort of preoccupation has come upon him before: years ago, for example, when he had built a flight of cement stairs in the middle of a building’s foundation, and for a while that was all there was. Just a set of steps leading to nowhere. Tulsa found himself lingering outside and moving around the thing like some photography faggot, watching it cast a toothy shadow that he knew was symbolic of something. That was an uncomfortable period in his life, right around the time he told his mother what he was. This won’t be as bad as that, nothing ever will be, but Tulsa still isn’t looking forward to this meeting. What can he do, though? This is the kind of stuff the foreman gets to deal with; it comes with this torn-up territory.
The problem is, is the new kid, with his big mouth. Most of the guys on Tulsa’s construction crew don’t care a rat’s flung anus that their boss and his boss go home in the same truck and presumably sleep in the same bed. God bless them, some of the most stubborn and old-fashioned guys have just gone ahead and convinced themselves that Tulsa and Terrence carpool to save gas. Nowhere else in his life has Tulsa seen ignorance work to such good advantage.
But this new kid, Kent Jaspers, he doesn’t seem to embrace their don’t ask, don’t tell policy. He keeps bitching about his light-footed bosses. On somebody else’s site it might be standard fare to question the foreman’s sexuality, but here it’s too true to joke about. Besides, Tulsa has a terrible sense of humor on the topic of his sexuality. If Jaspers doesn’t shut up, he might rip the blinders off this whole operation, and Tulsa isn’t looking to get chained to one of his own company trucks and dragged around behind it. So he has called Jaspers in for a little gum flap. Excuse the phrase, but they need to get a few things straight.
The kid knocks and comes in, sits down across the particle board desk from Tulsa without speaking. Tulsa can barely stand being in the trailer, and he’s only in here when he has paperwork to do or something he needs to set down. The floor is covered with the same carpet as the portable classrooms at his old high school, a joint he never did graduate from and doesn’t like to be reminded of. The synthetic smell, the fake paneling on the walls, and the way the fucking door sticks whenever it wants to: This room feels hostile to Tulsa, like the trailer knows he doesn’t belong here, doesn’t belong in charge, doesn’t really have the sack for it. And yet Tulsa has been cooped up in here all day, letting the office erode his self-confidence, all because of Jaspers.
Tulsa takes a second to look at the kid. The office doesn’t seem to like Jaspers either, which is at least something. He’s slumped like he knows he’s in trouble. He probably shares Tulsa’s distaste for offices, and that’s why he chose to work in a shitty, unstable industry that lets him labor outside. Tulsa can almost relate. He must have twenty years on the kid, but he hasn’t forgotten what it was like to be young. Tulsa used to be one of the angriest kids in a tri-county area, with a bad attitude and a real mouth on his face too. Matter of fact, if he were twenty years younger, he might have killed Jaspers over what he’s been saying. He’s certainly put people in the hospital for implying less than what Jaspers has been explicitly saying.
“You know what I wanna talk to you about?”
Jaspers shrugs, but doesn’t answer. Tulsa can’t tell whether that means Jaspers knows better than to say it out loud or whether he’s as dumb as his handsome face says he ought to be. Tulsa sighs.
“You see these walls?” he says, pointing around at the room. “They’re pretty thin, and I don’t know if you’ve heard yourself lately, but your voice tends to carry, just clear as a bell.” Really, Tulsa heard about the kid’s trash talk from another guy on the site, someone he met during his stint in juvenile detention when he was about Jaspers’ age. The guy was a reliable snitch back then too, God love him but never trust him, Amen. Jaspers gets the point Tulsa is picking at. He looks pissed off, wondering what he’s in for.
“Let me ask you something,” Tulsa says. “Terrence, Mr. Jackson to you, he owns this company. If he were on site all the time like I am, would you go around calling him a nigger?”
“Hey, I’m not a racist,” Jaspers says, jumping to his own defense. Tulsa holds up a hand to stop him.
“I don’t care if you are,” he says. “You’re allowed to be a racist. You’re allowed to hate fags. You’re just not allowed to talk shit on my build site, you hear me?”
Jaspers shuts up with a quiet snap of his mouth, like a guppy. How much Tulsa really likes the kid is sad, all things considered. He no more wants to hate Jaspers than he wants to hate his own reflection in the bathroom mirror.
“Am I fired?” Jaspers asks.
Tulsa bites down hard on a smirk. “No. But you are free to go. Next time,” he says just when Jaspers has his hand on the door. “I will fire you.”
Jaspers leaves in a huff, but Tulsa feels sure he’ll get over it. Friday is nearly over, and Jaspers has all weekend ahead of him to blow off steam and come back to work just fine. Tulsa can hope along with the best of the fools, in other words. Never say he is not an optimist.
He still has a few minutes until Terrence comes by to pick him up, and Tulsa spends the time holed up in the office, not wanting to poke a stick into the rattlesnake nest that the parking lot full of his employees looks to be at the moment. When Terrence’s truck pulls up, Tulsa is already standing. He locks up fast, hoping to keep Terrence from honking or even slowing down for long. He jumps in the passenger seat and asks Terrence to get moving before they even exchange pleasantries. Terrence can guess why.
“D’you talk to him, then?” Terrence wears the suit in this operation ever since he inherited the building business from his uncle. The both of them used to be bottom-rung workers at Jackson Constructs, and that is why Tulsa still feels like a phony sometimes in his hateful little office, knowing he only has that job because he’s fucking the boss, and that’s the truth.
“Yeah, I talked to him,” Tulsa says, putting a hand between his face and the window as they pass a couple of guys who are yammering near their open doors of their trucks. He never really got over the shame of what he is, but sometimes when he is with Terrence he can forget about that shame for a while, and so here is the choice he has made: Terrence in the driver’s seat, taking him home. “I think it’ll be okay,” Tulsa says.
“Then why we leaving so fast?”
“I think it’ll be okay by Monday.”
Terrence nods and they drive home in comfortable silence, Tulsa trying to cheer himself up with how good Terrence looks buttoned up and neatly cinched, even though he’s kind of getting to be an old bastard, too. Tulsa has always liked that Terrence has much bigger lips than he does, and not to be racist himself, they make kissing Terrence awfully nice and spacious. He’d like to kiss him now, but by mutual agreement they keep all that sort of thing inside, which means Tulsa has to wait until they get home.
The wait isn’t long by relative means, but it aches in him all the same. To take the edge off, Tulsa slides a hand over the vinyl of the seat, touching Terrence’s two-toned fingers and feeling them close on his hand like trap. The contact is little enough, but it keeps him going. Every day Tulsa doesn’t crawl beneath a cement pourer or fall from some scaffolding is a day he gets to ride home with Terrence, and that’s a good day, if you can’t already tell.
_______________________
L.A. Fields is a writer of gay fiction whose work will soon appear in the anthologies Cool Thing: The Best New Gay Fiction From Young American Writers and Unspeakable Horror: From the Shadows of The Closet. She is an undergraduate student in her home state of Florida, and someday intends to make a decidedly working-class living with her writing. She can be reached at all4laf@gmail.com.
Photo credit: “Construction Site” © Tanakawho, 2009. Used courtesy of Creative Commons License.
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