The Final Testament of the Holy Bible Read Free Page A

a neighborhood where the tallest building was twelve. There had been community opposition. A couple protests, and a big petition. I needed guys who were willing to work. To make sure that the site was secure. It’s harder than you think finding them. Most people want something for nothing. They want everything to be easy. When a job is hard, they demand more money, more time off, they complain to their union reps and try to renegotiate terms. That’s not the way it works. Life is hard, deal with it. Working sucks, deal with it. I’d love to sit home and collect a check every two weeks for watching baseball games and spending time with my kids. Doesn’t happen that way. You gotta work for everything in this world. Scratch and claw and fight for every little thing. And it never gets easier. Never. And it doesn’t end until you die. And then it doesn’t matter.Learn to deal with that. It’s the way of the world. You fight and struggle and work your ass off and then you die. Deal with that.
    He came in with a resume. It said his name was Ben Jones, that he was thirty years old. He was wearing a button-down with the logo of a security guard school on it. My first impression of him was that he was very eager, very excited, and very nervous. His hand was shaking when I shook it. His lips were quivering. Aside from his basic biographical information, and an eight-week course at the security school which made him officially qualified for the job, the resume was empty. I asked him where he was from and he said Brooklyn . I asked him if he went to college, he said no . I asked him when he left home and he said at fourteen . I told him that seemed young and he shrugged and I asked what he’d been doing for the past sixteen years and he changed, just a little, but he changed, and something in his eyes came out that was really sad and really lonely and extremely painful. It was only there for a second, and normally I wouldn’t notice anything like that, or pay attention to it, or give a shit, but it was very striking, and he looked down at his feet for a moment and then looked up and said I’ve had hard times and I’m ready to work and I promise I’ll be the best worker you have, I promise . And that was it. He didn’t offer anything else and I didn’t push it. I just thought to myself sixteen fucking years, what the fuck has this guy been doing. And I still think about it, all the time, what the fuck was he doing. And I imagined, andstill do, because of the flash of deep sadness and loneliness and pain that I saw, that whatever it was, and wherever it was, it had been truly truly awful.
    So I gave him the job. He was very excited. Like a little kid at Christmas. A big smile, a huge smile. He said thank you about fifty times. And he kept shaking my hand. It was funny, and very endearing. It wasn’t like he’d won the fucking lotto. He got a minimum wage job walking around a construction site for twelve fucking hours a day.
    I put him on the five-days-a-week day shift. Thought that would be best. That he’d be proud to have that position. And he was. It showed in how he did the job. He was always on time. His uniform was always clean. He never tried to extend his breaks or his lunch. He never complained. He seemed fascinated by the process of putting a building up: knocking in the pilings, setting the foundation, the construction of the skeleton frame. He’d ask different people questions about what they did, or why they did things a certain way. He’d listen very intently to their answers, like he was gonna be tested on it or something. He was generally the happiest guard I’d ever seen or had on a job, and he became sort of the site mascot. Everybody liked him and enjoyed having him around. He knew everyone’s name and would greet everyone in the morning and say goodbye at the end of the day. There were only two things that ever seemed off, and I dismissed them both because he did such a good job and seemed so happy.