Tower Dog by Doug Delaney

Author:Doug Delaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Technology
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2017-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE mississippi

I HAVE CHARTED A COURSE TO THE VINEYARD

Leaving Levittown, all I could think was Up yours, Thomas Wolfe, you prescient bastard. I was thinking about the good old days that weren’t so good. Crossing back over the George Washington Bridge and into New Jersey, I remembered that first tower in El Dorado, and when I remember El Dorado as somehow being the good old days, I never feel the cold. The cold. The heat. A broken heart. The loss of a loved one. You can’t feel those things like you can when you are mired in that time and place any more than you can really feel anyone else’s pain. You can say you feel it, but you can’t feel it. You can’t feel it because it ain’t yours and it ain’t now. But what I did feel was a melancholy sense of loss. The loss of working with men like Power and Hangman and Brody. The work will always be just that, but one of the things that makes it doable is the men you are with. You spend more time with these guys than with your family, your woman, or your children. They are the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you see at night, and though it is often said you don’t have to like him but you do have to work with him, that seldom floats. It is impossible not to take the job home when the job is home.

When I rolled into the parking lot at the Extended Stay, my thoughts had been so filled with what I wanted to be the good old days that I could not remember the drive over. I had arrived on automatic. And for the most part, that is how I went to work for the next few days. There is a reason men in the field have the option to take off for a week every six weeks, and I was the poster dog for that at the moment. I had been out over nine weeks. I was getting sloppy. I was getting tired. The rush of being back among the men had waned. The nightly debriefings were turning into postmortems. My intolerance of the new hands was thickening by the day. I was getting pissy. Jimmy and Scotty had mobed back to Nashville to work the market from that end, and Sarge and Devil Anse, already burning out, had much more on their plates. And most of all I missed Meagan and the baby more than I ever thought I could. Phone calls weren’t doing it. Phone calls were not enough. I had almost convinced myself that it was okay. That my son was just an infant and he could not possibly remember that I was not there. He could not hold that against me. Before he was born, I had told my sister that I was afraid I did not have the “Dad Gene,” and up until the moment he arrived, I was still unsure and petrified.

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