"Who is it?" the foreman screamed.
"Its Tacos," Garner replied, almost without thinking.
"Whatchu want?"
"I need to take off early on Wednesdays."
"This Wednesday?" the foreman asked with irritation.
"No," Garner replied, "all Wednesdays till next June."
"Forget it," the foreman replied with increasing irritation. "Now go away!"
"But," Garner began.
"I said get lost! I'm having lunch."
With that Garner stepped away from the trailer door and went back over to workers trailer to get his lunch. He looked up at the sky, which was getting dark and menacing.
"Just like the foreman's mood," he thought. But that was O.K. It was just what he wanted. People remember when you irritate them.
All that afternoon the foreman gave Garner leering, suspicious glances. He was trying to figure out what Garner was trying to get away with. But that, too, was O.K. with Garner. The more the man puzzled over it, the more likely he was to remember. Finally, just before quitting time, the foreman approached Garner.
"Hey, Tacos," he said with measured caution. "What's this about wanting Wednesday's off? You got a second job or something?"
"No. Nothing like that," Garner replied. "I want to go to school and one of the classes I need starts early on Wednesdays. It's a special two semester math class."
The foreman pondered this while looking at Garner with a mix of admiration and distrust. Admiration because he was trying to better himself. After a long hard day in the hot sun, he would go sit in a class so that he could have a better life. But there was also distrust because the guys who took classes often started thinking of themselves as better than everyone else.
"Whatchu going to study?"
"Construction Science."
"Construction Science?" The foreman rocked back like he had been hit with a splash of cold water. "You mean you want to do this nasty job for the rest of your life?" He was caught completely off guard. He thought for sure that this good looking middle class Anglo would want to study business maybe with designs on law school - something that would get him out of the dirt of the construction site and into an air conditioned office.
"I like building things," Garner said simply. "When you build a building, it stays there."
It was, of course, the perfect answer. Many men were on the construction site because they had no skills and hence no choice. But many of the men had choices and chose to stay. Despite the dirt and the heat, the sore muscles and skinned knuckles, there was something magically satisfying about construction work. You began with a muddy pit and out of it grew a building. Everyday you could see the accumulation of your efforts until it was hard to believe that there was a time when the building was not there. You could stand on a fourth floor slab and think "three months ago, I would have been standing in mid air."
And when you finished, the building stayed. You could drive by it later and point it out to your friends. You could remember the crew and the weather, the mishaps and the successes that went into the finished product of concrete and steel. For most other people, there was no record of the work they did. They went to meetings and moved paper around in offices. But the construction worker had a physical product. If your children ask you what you do, you can drive by a building that you worked on and say "I built that." The scrapbook of your life's work, the portfolio of your accomplishments, was right there in the open for the public to see and it would be there for a very long time.
The foreman could not argue with Garner on this point. It would be like challenging one of the sacred tenets of the profession, without which their work would have no meaning. Without the building, it would be just another dirty, sweaty job.
"O.K. You can leave early on Wednesdays," he said. "But, I want you here early to make up the time and if we have a late pour or if we have to work overtime you'll have to miss class. The job comes first." He gave Garner a stern look, trying hard to hide the admiration and pride that he really felt.
"It's a deal!" Garner said eagerly as he took the foreman's hand to shake on the deal. He covered the back of the foreman's hand with his left hand to make the handshake more intimate. It wasn't just a deal, it was a moment of bonding. It was a moment of shared meaning that Garner would need to exploit later.
The clouds overhead were gathering in darker and more ominous congregations, as Garner headed home. He flinched as a clap of thunder followed on the heels of a lightening flash. He looked up at the sky through his side window and thought about how the torrential rains of San Antonio could be life saving or life taking. When the crops were withering the rains would save them. When the rivers flooded, lives could be lost. It had little to do with the motives of people, and every thing to do with the blind forces of nature. A good man might drown and an evil man might be saved. The rain did not care. It just fell. It fell into groves that became furrows. The furrows flowed into ditches, the ditches into streams and then rivers. When there was too much rain, it overflowed the banks of rivers and streams invading the land where motives defined the relationships between people. But the rain did not care. It just fell and flowed and waited to return to the sky.
It was almost six o'clock when Garner arrived at his apartment. He took a long cool shower, toweled off and went out on his balcony to take a nap on the lounge. After a short nap, he felt fully refreshed and finished getting cleaned up. Then he headed back to his car to take care of his errands for the evening.
His first errand was to go by the University and sign up for his fall classes. The University was open until nine o'clock, but it only took Garner a few minutes to take care of his business. His second stop, which was dinner at the Casa del Norte, would take a little longer.
The Casa del Norte was a trendy Tex-Mex Restaurant on the north side of town in a newly developed and prestigious commercial area called High Noon. The name was derived from the location of the district. If a clock face were superimposed on the map of San Antonio, High Noon would be almost exactly at the twelve o'clock mark. Among other things in the area were the Bexar (pronounced Bear) County Courthouse, any number of law firms, real estate development firms and a wide variety of professional services. Between six and nine, the Casa del Norte held happy hour in its barroom, which adjoined the restaurant. During this time they would have a special on upscale beers and free nachos. Even the nachos were upscale, often made with exotic chili peppers and unusual cheeses. It was where the cream of San Antonio's professional class met and mingled. And Garner was there two or three times a week working his way into the inner circle.
"Hey, Garner. We have Dos Equis on tap tonight," the bartender called out as Garner walked in. The bartender liked Garner's name. It was a classy sort of name that fit well with the image of the establishment. Local guys had names like Sam or Jack or Buck. But Garner was a name with distinction. The crowd that frequented the Casa del Norte was a crowd of Northeast wannabe's. They fostered the illusion that they had achieved the sophisticated Northeast lifestyle without having to put up with crime, traffic, homeless people, or social pressure. Even though the majority of the patrons were local, they wasn't a cowboy hat, string tie, or pair of snake skin cowboy boots to be seen anywhere. But there were some giveaways. They would pronounce the 'r' in croissant, and would sometimes add jelly to the cream cheese on a bagel.
Garner began showing up regularly in the midsummer when business was slow. Many of the usual crowd were on vacation and there was a slumber like quality to the place as those who were stuck in town drifted in to see if there were any other unfortunate prisoners of responsibilities. Each evening he would order a mug of whatever beer was on special and watch whatever sports event was on the television. He didn't care that much for sports, particularly rodeo, but it would give him something to make small talk about later. He figured that whatever was on the tube was what the patrons were interested in. So, to him, it was just doing his homework.
The first time he showed up at the bar, it was all very strange. He looked at the menu and didn't recognize anything.
"What's good tonight?" he asked the bartender.
"The cheese enchiladas," the bartender replied. "They are made with four cheeses, diced olives and blackened Redfish."
It was the diced olives and blackened Redfish that made it O.K. to serve enchiladas in this upscale establishment.
From that night on, Garner would listen to what the other patrons around the bar were ordering. Each night he would order something he heard the night before, until, eventually, he sounded just like another local customer. One night he got some horrible green stuff made from mashed avocados and sour cream. But he choked it down and vowed never to make that mistake again.
After a few weeks, the familiarity of his face gained the trust of the bartender. First, the bartender gave him a free draft when the television reported that some rodeo record had just been broken. Later on that evening the bartender came over to Garner and started polishing glasses from behind the bar.
"I've seen you in here quite a bit," the bartender began. "You from around here?"
Garner was pleased that he wasn't an obvious transplant. "Nah, I'm from the Northeast," Garner replied in a slight, ambiguous southern drawl. It was soft enough to make his voice acceptable to the Texans while not so drawn out as to belie his claims of being form the Northeast. To the patrons of Casa del Norte, Northeast meant anything east of the Mississippi and north of Richmond.
"What brings you down here?" the bartender asked casually, sounding more like he was just keeping the conversation going than really trying to get information.
"I wanted to get into construction," Garner replied, "but building in those big cities is nasty work. Quality of life is better here. So I came down to study Construction Science as UTSA."
It fed right into the bartender's prejudices against the Northeast. He imagined a concrete structure so covered in grime that you couldn't even see the gray color of the concrete. He saw workers pale from lack of sunshine and tubercular from the car exhaust. And over the building hung a perpetual dark gray cloud cover.
"You working construction while you're going to school?" The bartender asked as he came back from his dark reveries about the horrible living conditions in the Northeast.
"Yeah." Garner replied, simply.
"Tough work," the bartender observed.
"Yeah," Garner repeated.
A moment of silence followed as the two men pondered the difficulties of construction work. The bartender also pondered the horrible conditions from which Garner had escaped and admired him even more. A bonding had begun between the two men. And Garner would nurture that bond until it was time to exploit it.
It was an hour before closing when Garner asked for his bill. Bartenders lose respect for the patrons that stay until closing. They seem too dependent. Garner knew this and did not want to wear out his welcome. He left a tip that was generous without being extreme and left by the side door.
Outside the rain was coming down in torrents. Even with the heavy rains he had seen in Jacksonville, he had never seen rain come down like this before. He thought that if the rain was any harder, he might be able to swim through it.
During the time that Garner had been bonding with the bartender he did not see the flood warnings that were flashing across the television. In many places, flood warnings mean that the river may rise a few inches and the streets might be covered in water. But the people of San Antonio know that flood warnings mean more than getting you feet wet. Flood warnings mean that you are in danger of loosing your life.
Garner was a master of dealing with people. He was always in complete control. But dealing with the forces of nature is something different entirely and Garner was going to learn what it was like to loose control.