It was two or three summers ago. One of the real hot ones. I was working construction, well more like demolition. Worse than demolition, really. See, the crew I was on would scrape out, clear out or haul out any kind of totally toxic shit a building had. Totally awful gig. But it paid ten bucks more an hour than any other demo gig. We called it “poison pay.”
Of course, I ended up on a team with Jay. Didn’t matter that he was probably PNW Salish, and I was Montana Blackfoot. That’s just the way it was, way it always has been since picking teams in second grade. The Natives ended up together. Maybe it wasn’t by design. Yeah, and maybe there’s a troll living under the bridge downtown.
Jay was alright. Older, more of my dad’s generation. Big strong quiet guy with beat down eyes. Man had seen some shit. Probably done some shit, too but I didn’t ask, he didn’t tell and that was pretty much cool with both of us. You could read his mood through his silence, its timing whether it was a still quiet or something more intense. I understood this language. Fuck, I’d grown up with it.
Anyway, it was on this one job, a truly shitty one, that Jay got quiet and walked upstairs. It was right after we heard about the third floor. I turned it over in my head a bit and then decided it probably wouldn’t hurt if I went to check on him. Might not help either but may as well, you know?
Jay was dangling his legs over the balcony. He’d pulled off his respirator and fired up a cigarette. I sat down next to him and didn’t say anything, just kind of stared off like he was. The bay stretched out into dense, murky grey ahead of us. Behind us, I could hear the whine of reciprocal saws and the thuds of pry bars sinking into shoddy drywall. Jay and I just kind of both zoned it all out. The noise, the job, the third floor. He let a long plume of smoke out toward the bay, adding it to the fog that showed no signs of burning off. It was a moment or two before a chirping voice broke the silence.
“Smoking on an asbestos job. There’s some irony for ya.”
It was Annie. She was pretty new to the team. Not a bad worker. Not bad company. A bit too quick with a smartass observation but the days would grind that out of her soon enough. I’d mentioned that to Jay once, but he just smiled and said, “At least she gives enough of a fuck to observe.” Which was a pretty Jay thing to say. Guy seemed to run pretty deep, you know?
Annie’s usual bent grin showed itself as she yanked off her respirator and plopped down next to me. Jay slid the pack of smokes toward her.
“Fucked job, huh?” she said, her grin fading,
I nodded, “Very.” Jay sucked up another lungful of smoke.
“It’s true then,” she said. “What they found on the third floor?”
I could feel Jay stiffen a little next to me. His silence tightened up a notch or two. It seemed like Annie needed something from us, some vague sign that we were all cool and would remain so. Knowing Jay wasn’t going to, I obliged.
“Yeah, six of them. In the walls. Shit like that happens in old buildings. The ones built before the fire especially. This one even more so, I guess.”
“I heard the bones were small.” Annie’s grin had completely disappeared now. “Like kids.”
Jay’s voice was low but strong, “They were,” he said. I could hear the anger in him. It wasn’t directed at Annie. It was a more free-floating kind of hate. Generational you might say.
“You know what this place was… before it was an SRO flophouse, right?” Jay said in a flat tone, his eyes still searching the gray sea ahead.
“Some sort of school,” she said blandly.
Jay was trying to be patient with her. What’s common knowledge on the rez is usually a mystery off it.
“It was a residential school. Most of them were up in Canada but there were a few down here,” Jay said. I noticed a muscle in his neck had started to twitch. “They took kids from the reservation here to ‘civilize’ them. Which often meant beatin’ em to death and burying them. Never saw them in the walls before.”
“You seen this before? The skeletons… The little ones?”
Jay didn’t answer that. Didn’t even look at me. He just flicked his smoke away and strapped his respirator on. “C’mon he said. We’re on the attic.”
As Jay trudged off toward the stairs, Annie cast a look at his broad back and then stubbed out her cigarette. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No. Not at all,” I said. Obviously, she was wrestling with some other side of some other generational coin. “Jay’s probably seen a lot of shit. He processes it his own way, I guess.”
“Fuck,” Annie said, masking up. “The attic. That’s worse than the basement.”
The mold on the walls thickened with each flight. By the time Jay, Annie and I reached the 7th floor, the air was thick with spores, sickly greenish motes floating in the wet rotting air. Jay led the way, step by step, like these weird ass spores were just another fucked thing in another fucked job on another fucked day. As we were heading up another flight, he turned to Annie and I for a second. His face was obscured by the respirator, but his eyes seemed to say: Walk. Just walk off the job, walk out of the building and keep walking. Then it was gone.
“You guys good?” was all he said as he pointed to a ring in the ceiling, the hatch for the attic stairs. Annie and I both nodded.
“Rock Paper Scissors?” she asked. I figured she was trying hard to put up that grin behind her mask.
Jay shook his head. “Nah, I got it.”
The ladder came down with an explosion of glowing green spores. There was something sickly in them, something wrong. Jay didn’t care, he bounded up the ladder like he was going to meet someone. Looking back, I guess he was. Low, I told Annie to hang back a sec as I climbed up behind him.
The ladder was covered in slippery mold, greenish and, I swear to God, swirling in colors. I climbed up into the darkness and pulled myself into the attic.
It was insane. Something churned in my gut as I blinked in the oozing green darkness. The mold seemed alive. I mean like fucking sentient. Jay had somehow already made it to the middle of the room and the spores were swirling around him, starting to cover him.
“You really shouldn’t be here,” he said in a flat, dead voice that scared the shit out of me. Then, he took off his respirator and started breathing the spores in. Big deep breaths like in a sweat when the coals and cedar sprigs are ready.
I froze for a second, unable to move, unable to not watch what was happening in front of me. Jay’s broad back started to ripple under the green moss creeping over him. I could hear something popping.
His joints, my mind screamed.
I’d heard stories. I’d chalked them up to old timer bullshit but here it was, happening right in front of me. I felt my stomach flip, bile rise. And still, I couldn’t move. Then I heard Annie from downstairs.
“Everything okay up there?” she asked.
That got me moving. I slid down the stairs, grabbed Annie’s hand and ran, not looking back. Halfway across the 7th floor, Annie looked back and screamed. I never asked her what she saw, and I never will.
I pulled Annie along with me, past crews, down more stairs. As we ran, I heard sounds: choking, something guttural and not exactly human. The light had gained a sickly greenish glow. I could feel it behind me… death.
We came out on the street and kept running, all the way to my car. Neither of us looked back or said a word as that job, that day faded behind us.
The news said it was a toxic mold that killed the seventeen people on our demolition crew. Well, I can tell you it wasn’t a gas leak or toxic mold or acute asbestos poisoning. It was Jay.
The reason I’m writing any of this down is cause I saw Annie again just a couple of nights ago. She came into the bar I’m working in. No more demo for me, thank you very much. She seemed older; a bit slower in the way she talked. The lopsided grin didn’t make any appearances as she nursed a whiskey with a Rainier back. She’d been spending a lot of her time on the San Juan Islands, off the grid, just kind of “out there” as she put it.
“I saw him again, you know,” she said and something icy twisted inside me. “Jay.”
She was on a ferry and they passed one of those aluminum boats you see all over up here. The man behind the wheel turned and looked up at her and she’d swear to Christ it was Jay. Same broad back. Same flat eyes. He nodded to her, and then the boat was too far away to recognize anything.
I wrestled with the cold feeling, playing some things out in my mind before I asked her.
“How big a boat?”
She looked at me, like it was the stupidest question ever. But it wasn’t. Not even close.
“I don’t know. Thirty, maybe thirty-five feet.”
A thirty-five-footer might make it to Canada. Part of me hoped it couldn’t. But another part of me, an older deeper part of me, hoped it would.