The red-haired one had heard stories of Illinois.
“You a gangster?” the boy asked eagerly.
Nathan smiled. “No, I’m an engineer. They build better dams than gangsters.”
The boy was undeterred. “But I’ll bet you’ve seen them shoot people.”
“No,” Nathan said. “Sorry, but I must have moved in the wrong circles. You say the drugstore is up that way?”
Both boys nodded.
Nathan fished out a coin from his pocket and tossed it to the nearer of the two. He left them, their heads bent together over the coin, and made his way up the street.
WHEN NATHAN REACHED THE DRUGSTORE, A BIG, TWO-TON Henley coated with a fine layer of red dust was already there, men crowded onto its flat bed. Nathan waved for them to hold up, and the men in the back yelled for him to hurry. He ran the last twenty yards, the leather of his shoes chewing into his feet, his hat clutched to his head. A half dozen hands reached out and pulled him up, then the truck was off, trailing a black plume of exhaust.
They were rough faces, some pleasant, scrubbed clean and red that morning in their rented rooms. Others were still shaking off the sleep, their crusted eyes lost while a callused finger worked idly in an ear or scratched a rib as the truck rode the track out to the river. Nathan took off his hat and held it between his knees when the air coming across the open bed of the truck nearly took it off. The others had their ragged farm hats tugged firmly about their ears, or else wore scarred and nicked hardhats from the site. Some sat on theirs like low stools. Nathan watched the faces for a while, waiting for someone to question him. One or two dug out breakfasts they had packed away. One nearer Nathan took out what looked to be a raw potato, which he didn’t eat but only spent some care cleaning before tucking it away again.
Three miles outside of town, the way split off from the road, became a gravel track that led to an open gate in a tall chainlink fence. To either side of the fence entrance men clustered, and the truck threaded slowly through them.
“Shouldn’t be in the way like that,” complained a man standing near the front. “They’re supposed to wait over there by them trees.” Nathan followed his gesture and spotted a larger group of ten or twelve sitting in the pine needles and leaning against trunks.
“What are they waiting for?” he asked.
“For one of us to die,” said another and the men laughed.
“Jobs.” A pinched-faced man on his left spat the word out at Nathan, his tone betraying how foolish he found the question. “Isn’t that what everyone is after these days?”
The truck pulled through the gate and followed a winding path through the trees. At the top of a rise, the river came into view. Nathan shifted up onto one knee. He caught only glimpses of the works through the leaves at first, but then they broke from the trees and it all came visible at once.
The cofferdam was huge. It spanned the entire middle section of the river, holding back the water to create a dry place, and into it men poured. From high on the hill, they were a thousand fretting specks coursing over the site. Ten thousand spires of rebar thrust up from the dam, their lower ends buried in concrete casings that were sunk to the bedrock. The length of the dam curved its back against the flow of the river as it spanned the channel. This would allow it to bear the weight of the water, like a Roman arch. Everywhere he looked, more concrete glowed dull white in the mid-morning sunlight.
The truck halted behind a row of low buildings. Someone had scrawled a list of obscenities across their back walls, the lettering running downhill as if the writer had grown tired. The men lurched into motion, rising in pairs and groups and dropping off the rear of the truck to walk down the hill. Nathan put his hat on and went around to the driver.
“Engineer’s office?” he asked, and the man moved his short cigar around in his mouth before pointing to a huddle of structures in the distance.
The front walk of the building was caked with mud from the site that had been tracked by the engineers’ and foremen’s boots. Nathan tried to pick his way around the larger clods. When he pulled the front door open, thick cigarette smoke and the early morning smell of hair cream surrounded him.
A dozen men sat at drafting tables, heads bent over plans and notebooks spread before them.
“What is it?” said one at a large desk near the back.
“I’m here to start work,” Nathan said.
“Name?” The man opened a ledger on his desk, began searching with a stained finger.
“McReaken,” he said, and this time it came out more naturally than it had with the boarding house woman.
“Yeah, you’re on the list. You were supposed to be here yesterday. You have trouble with the train?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re not the first. These yokels are congenitally incapable of running anything on time.”
Another man came in behind Nathan, brushed his way past him. “First of the concrete trucks just showed up, Mr. Maufrais,” he said.
Maufrais took his watch from his pocket, scowled. “I hope that they had a nice, relaxing breakfast.” He picked up the telephone, dialed. “Jack? Yeah, your concrete is here. Yeah, well. Just be glad that they showed up. Yeah.” He turned back to Nathan. “There’ll be a load of paperwork to fill out. I’m out of carbons until the supply truck shows up tomorrow, though, so you’ve got a reprieve until then.” The telephone rang again, and Maufrais answered it.
Nathan glanced around the room. Neat rows of men at desks with heads down over their work. A handful of slide rules hung along a sideboard at the end of the room. In Memphis, the men had christened their slide rules with names like Excalibur and Equation Slayer, or else had strode about the office with them sometimes slung low through their belts like pistols. Looking about the room, Nathan saw no playfulness here.
Maufrais hung up the telephone and regarded Nathan again, this time more thoroughly, starting with his dusty shoes and traveling up to his crooked tie knot.
“You understand that this position is probationary?” he said.
“I understood that was a possibility,” Nathan said. “Obviously, I had hoped—”
“It is more than a possibility. It’s a fact of the position. The probationary period will last ninety days. At the end of that time, you will either be offered a permanent position on the team, or else be asked to leave in order to make space for another candidate. There are occasionally special circumstances which may arise that can entitle a candidate to additional probationary time, but those are rare, so I wouldn’t really consider that an option.”
“Ninety days? I hadn’t realized that the timeframe would be so short.”
“Ninety days is generally sufficient.”
Three months, Nathan thought. All that he’d done, all that it had cost him to stand here, traded for three months at a chance. He frowned and Maufrais’ eyebrows rose.
“Do I take it you don’t want the job?” he asked.
“I do want the job,” Nathan said. “It’s only—”
“This is not an ordinary organization, and as such we expect the employees we take on to rise above the ordinary level. A probationary period helps us guarantee that. It’s been the paradox of working in this rural area: we’re awash in unskilled labor. They’re literally lining up at our gate, whereas obtaining skilled workers, the engineering class and above, has been more of a challenge. What tells us best is the work.