Rigo

Behind the darkness of his color, a burnt-black, relentless intensity waited. In his basalt face, I saw deep fatigue. I saw strain. I saw the exigency of a man internally lurching against some kind of chain, as if the roof we were working on was just his cover-story. He had a habit of always being first on site in the morning. He had a habit of silence. Near him, I had a habit of caution. I didn’t know what was going to happen. But I had been given to him.

 I stood by as he installed what I would later figure out were called roof-jacks – low safety barriers – along the roof’s edge. His red ball cap was logoed with a black-and-white soccer ball over-lain with the words “Cruz Azul” – whatever that meant. He showed me how to get into the harness. I didn’t understand a word he said, but I got that he meant me to watch what he did next. With a four-pronged spade, his hammer-like arms pried-up, then heaved big clumps of the thick, ancient shingles over the edge. I watched the age-blackened, broken roofing that he made look snowflake-light shower to the steel floor of a huge dumpster far below.

On the roof, up in the morning sun, we stood face-to-face. I was a head taller, but I was his tool. Meant to stop a man in a terminal-velocity fall, the lanyard on a roofer’s safety harness is shackled to a big D-ring sewn between the shoulder blades. Long enough to allow free travel around on a roof, the other end of the powerful tether is shackled to a second big D-ring screwed to the roof peak. Even darker than his shining skin, the eyes carefully inspected the closure of my harness’s leg and shoulder buckles. Softly, where the wide harness strapping laid down my back, over my rear, back up through my crotch – across my chest - the brown fingers checked quickly.

Last, with a sudden power that shocked me wobbling, both brown hands grabbed the harness straps laying on my chest and yanked me off balance. Afraid he’d yank again, I shifted my feet to try to be ready.  Apparently satisfied, he looked approvingly up in my eyes and told me, “Orale, maguey” – which seemed to mean we were good. Then he turned away and left me alone.

I was to start peeling-off the old estate’s original 1880s roof.

I peered past the barrier of the six-inch-high roof jacks and down over the roof edge. I knew the dumpster was thirty feet long, but forty feet down, the big yellow bin looked shoe box size. I was hired as labor, but I didn’t feel so great. I tried to get my footing. Feebly, I poked at the roof. Then hard, I jammed the spade under a course of the old shingles. The spade got stuck. I yanked, but it wouldn’t come. When I finally wrenched the tool free, I staggered off-balance and nearly fell over on my back.   

Blandings Stand is what the long-abandoned mansion was called. Except for the fact that Blandings Stand was all roofed hip-ended, you could’ve called it the house of a dozen gables – four wings, each with its own intricately-corbelled, brick chimney, each long roof slope with its own low, attic-lighting little gable.

In the cool morning air, I was starting on the west wing. Glad to be alone, I took in the incredible view. A mile or so off, probably five hundred feet lower, I could see glittering rush-hour traffic swarming along the wide concrete ribbon of I-5 as it snaked south toward downtown Seattle. At my elevation, I could also see same traffic oozing out the far side of the towering cluster of skyscrapers like some sort of extruding substance. More west, Elliot Bay stretched blue and cool and far away. Further west still, a speck tug was shrinking a saw-bug barge north across Puget Sound. Close overhead, a 747 roared on its south-bound vector for Boeing Field.

By late morning, even in the shade, it was eighty. My body was gravity-feed. Like it was atomic fuel, I dumped water in the top. It came out lower – everywhere. One of the things I got from the dark man’s tear-off demo was that I was to move it - that is to say, finish the tear-off of the west wing today.

And now I was heated up full blast and having at it. I was stoked! Shingles flew. The dark man never came back. I was glad. I was doing it. I was more than half done with the west wing. I knew I was right on time. I was giving it hell. I felt so strong – like even quitting drinking! The longer I was left alone, the more I would have to show him. The more I got done, the less afraid of the dark man I was. I was uber-pumped! I was charging hard. I was speeding - lifting-off whole three-foot-square sections of the old roof, stacking three of the sections, then carrying the whole mess up over the peak, back down the torn-off side and, without stopping, heaving them into their free-fall to the dumpster below. The big whump they made landing in the dumpster was super satisfying. But I was very near death.

My problem was that the grimness in the dark man’s last glance back at me as he started down the ladder in the morning shook me up and so I never just stood still and thought the task out. Now, packing my shingle loads over the peak and down the torn-off side, I stumbled on the nail-head-studded skip-sheeting that originally had served as strips to fasten the shingles.

But now I was a machine. Fast as I could, empty-handed, I jumped back over for the next sections of tear-off. When I bounded over the roof peak, my tether hung up on the usual nail heads. I fought the damn lanyard. I stumbled. I caught myself. I reached my left behind me for the heavy line and yanked. But the lanyard resisted, then came off unexpectedly. I saw it coming – the row of roof-jacks. My own momentum threw me into a staggering, stumbling foot-fumble, but the long tether checked me. I left-grabbed the big lanyard again. To flick the stupid cord out of my way, I spun, and frustrated, hard as I could, I whipped my left.

But my umbilical didn’t fling.

My right foot hung up and I tipped backwards off the roof. I fell to my death. The blank shock and awe of dying. I might’ve screamed, but the body-blow of sudden stop flung my breath into space. My face smacked my chest. My shoulders. My groin. Especially my neck. Stabbing pain. I caught a young woman’s, chest-deep exclamation. I don’t know what she said. Searing pain – everywhere. I heard an aggravated man’s voice yell, “You! Rigo. Jump up there and rescue your - laborer!”

The sudden, mid-air stop had knocked all the snot out of my sinuses and splashed it all over my face. My rose-colored safety glasses were gone. Snot and drool trailed from my eyes, my nose, my mouth. Same as a punch in the face, the harness stopped my falling body. Just like what a seat belt does in a hundred-mile-an-hour head-on collision, my neck tried to stop my head.

Through the blur of my flooding eyes, I could see Cease Kramp, the aggravated Contractor, walk over under my spider-dangle and boost his new compound mitre saw onto his shoulder and carry it away to where he could protect it.

I heard the clank of tools in a tool belt bounding across the roof above me. Then, lifted by a hydraulic power, I ascended into heaven - out of sight of spectation.

Down on the ground, the same young woman kept saying – I couldn’t tell what. She couldn’t know it didn’t matter what she was saying. She couldn’t know I knew her even though I never knew her. But more than by the fall, I was shocked – after so long, how so certainly - I still knew her voice.

Muffled, from out of sight, I thought I heard her ask if I would be OK.  I know I heard her say, “That was pretty stupid.”

I was stunned by the exactness of my memory of who she had been and how I felt the day she said that same thing – “That was pretty stupid” - to me over the centerfield fence when she and I were in grade school. Now, even after nineteen years, suddenly hearing the nearness of her voice again, I couldn’t stop my heart reaching pointlessly out for her.

I was terrified she’d recognize me. I’d fought to kick free of her memory. Now, the old heat in her voice sucked me back nineteen years – where she yanked my sixth-grade heart out of my chest and flung it away up into the swamp’s tree tops. Now, as if nothing had happened to us, I ached to reach down to her.

But sitting on the roof where Rigo put me, I felt I might puke. I knew I could. I knew I was going to. The sky spun. My neck screamed. And when I heard Cease Kramp down on the ground say “Lostine, I’m awfully sorry you had to see that” – the name Lostine launched me and my churning guts to my feet. I clutched onto the corbel of one of the ancient chimneys. I stuffed my head down the open flue. I puked my guts out. I retched. I heaved. I could hear Cease down on the ground reassuring her that “we” – meaning his crew – felt “fortunate” that she chose us to do her restoration project and that he felt as personally about “this venerable old estate” as he knew she did. He rounded it off with the apology that, “But I have to hire from whoever applies.”

But I never applied. I just got spotted. I wasn’t thinking.

Lostine. Except in twenty years of my dreams, I never expected to hear her name ever again. Not never. When I was twelve, ignorant of what was actually happening to us, I watched her ascend through the night – up through the swamp’s black canopy, up like to heaven, up the wire toward the bright light on the dust-off chopper.

 I never saw her again. Not ever.

 On Blandings’ roof, hearing her voice again, I just dry-heaved. I couldn’t stop puking-up nothing. A blade was twisting in my guts, but I just couldn’t stop.

Rigo. The dark man. He grabbed both sides of my face and forced my head motionless and looked directly in both my eyes and decided something. Then he sat down beside me on my roof jack and he hugged me two-armed. He rocked me back and forth. He got me to sip some water and said stuff like maybe, “Cálmate, vato. Cálmate. Estás Seguro. Estás Seguro.” The purr of his voice just then, I’m telling you. It was a lullaby.

I tried to stifle the moans that were forcing up out of me. I just couldn’t take it. It wasn’t the fall. Not the slam of my harness. It was the shocking, time-magnified sense of loss. I never thought I’d hear her name ever again so I never thought about what I’d do or how I’d feel if I ever did. In my candy-wrapper sixth grade, I wasn’t ready for her lightning-strike, seventh-grade girlness. In the swamp, she sacrificed herself for our lives – Koz’s and mine. Lostine. Kids or not – we loved each other. But then she was just – gone.

Nineteen years later, up on Blandings’ roof, I was less ready for her. But it wasn’t her. After nearly twenty years, it was the truth of what I’d become that got shoved suddenly up my throat when I heard her voice – when I heard the same heat still in her voice. It was what I’d become - pretty much nothing. Forty feet up, slumped on a two-by-six roof jack, propped up by probably an illegal, I started to bawl.

Rigo didn’t let go of me. Somehow, he seemed – maybe by how intently I was listening to the two voices below us – somehow Rigo knew my pain wasn’t the fall or the harness. He didn’t let go of me. He turned my left palm up, and started kneading with both his thumbs; then, one by one, my fingers. I was melted by his gentleness. I was shocked at how much better he made me feel – how less alone and worthless I felt. By the time he changed to my right hand, I wanted him to never let go.

Sipping water, submitting to Rigo, I eavesdropped Lostine was an actual AIA certified Architect now. Nineteen years ago, in Coffin Marsh, with her eyes she told me she loved me. She was seventh grade. And her head held queen high, she didn’t flinch away when death came.

Last exchange I heard get said down on the ground started with her pretty direct words to the effect that, “I don’t know what I’m getting into on this restoration, Cecil. Nobody but you bid on this project, so please be authentic with me, Cease. I need you.”

Cease wanted to know what she meant. She just told him she didn’t know either. She just said she “got it for less than the land value,” and that the sale was handled with a cashier’s check. She said all of it is red-flags, but she didn’t care, that Blandings Stand was a dream come true. “Besides,” she said “money is just paper.”

Cease volunteered it wasn’t too late and that he’d tear up the contract if she wanted. He said, “We don’t have much invested yet. I can carry what you owe me on the books.”

“Never!” Her words gushed up from deep down near her ankle bracelet, “Never!” is what I heard her voice rasp. “Never! I live downtown Seattle. All I hear downtown is honking and yelling and sirens and air traffic over head and blood on the sidewalk in the morning - all metal and glass. It’s so dead and heartless. I love this old house, Cease. I intend to live here, Cease – alone if I have to - maybe AirB&B part of it.”

Abruptly, she asked, “Is he OK?”

“You mean Chet?”

“Your laborer who fell off the roof.”

“Lostine, I can tell you from personal experience that hitting the end of one of those harnesses is harsh, but Rigo will take care of him.”

Finally, she and Cease left together to look at some PVC facia material he told her will “eat up the bucks” but “will save so much future maintenance it’s ridiculous.”

Rigo got more water down me. When I stepped backwards off the roof before, I had just finished tearing off the roof of one of the west wing’s slopes and its little attic-light gable. Now Rigo just pulled his tape out of his tool belt and started measuring. He moved around on the roof like a daredevil. He showed me how to use a straight-edge and pencil to mark the locations of the roof framing under the plywood. We set-up a compressor and pneumatic nailer. With my pencil and straight-edge, I could barely keep up with the semi-auto thwack, thwack, thwack of Rigo running the nail gun. Together, we plywood-sheathed the whole south face.

At the end of the day, Rigo walked over to his truck and I walked over to mine. We’d worked together all day, him setting a machine-like pace that pounded me into the ground. Standing next to my rust bucket, I realized I already felt empty. I realized I didn’t want to drive away from the guy – a guy who made me feel - capable. His truck was a little tin-can pick-up long ago ramped off the boat from Japan, my beater a light green Ford E-100 cargo van rust-eaten – his faded blue pick-up fastidious.

We both clunked our tool belts onto our passenger side floors. We were both loners. Neither of us would have anybody riding with us. He walked back over to where I was standing, and besides dead tired, I felt grateful for the few seconds he spent carefully checking my eyes. His sudden grin would have been like the sun, except he poked me in the chest and he called me something – just two clear words – “Chico banda!” Anybody knows chico means boy. He’d seen me bawling my head off like a kid. I felt the sting of my face and neck flushing red. The joke was on me.

Then he turned and walked away back toward his faded blue truck, stopped halfway and warned over his shoulder, “Nos vemos en lunes, vato.”

Rigo. I noticed his left foot drag something invisible sometimes. A broken chain. Yeah.