Workin' on the Railroad

Chapter 1-2

From his seat on the tracked crane he operated, Alden Prescott glowered down at his foreman. “Damn it. Mitch, you’re so drunk you can’t find your ass with both hands. Just get the f**k out of the way and let us work. I can keep the crew in line. I’ve done it enough lately. All you’ll do is piss the men off and screw everything up, the shape you’re in. Go take a nap in your truck.”

The other man mumbled and huffed, but he really couldn’t make a valid protest. Alden didn’t quite understand the heavyset man’s garbled mixture of border Spanish and bad English, but that was probably for the best.

The son of a b***h is one of the sorriest excuses for a man, much less a foreman, I’ve ever had to work for. Why doesn’t he just get his fat, shitty ass out of the way and leave us alone?

Finally, the beefy foreman waddled off, still cussing and grumbling. Alden went back to work, swinging sections of track into the growing new line. Some members of the crew bolted the lengths of rail together, while others drove more spikes into the wooden ties to hold the rail in place. Behind Alden, another bunch worked tamping the ballast and fine-tuning the leveling to support the newly laid track. Once the spur was rebuilt, it would have to handle some heavy tonnage in ore shipped off to a distant smelter.

With years of experience in track-building and maintenance, Alden could have bid for the foreman job if he wanted to. He’d probably get it, too, but he preferred to avoid the paperwork and the people headaches. Machine operators drew good wages, anyway. The bad thing was that, with an incompetent foreman like Flannery, Alden had to do most of the other stuff anyway just to keep the job going.

Mexican and Irish, Flannery seemed to have inherited the very worst of all his ancestors. He was pugnacious, stupid, and had a vicious streak as wide as the yellow stripe of cowardice down his broad back. Flannery also had a weakness for booze and a fondness for MJ that would eventually catch up with him. For Alden, it couldn’t happen too soon. Unfortunately, the man apparently also had a few friends in the higher echelons of SJSW who covered his worthless ass and kept him on the job.

Right now, this crew was operating shorthanded, but the higher-ups had promised to get more men on the job soon. Alden knew they’d advertised in the newspapers of several southwestern cities. They seemed to think the men they sought were not on the Internet. While experienced railroad maintenance men were few and far between and mostly snapped up fast by the big carriers, even a few basic laborers would help. So long as they could follow instructions and were not afraid to work, he’d help train them. Maybe that was not too much to hope for.

As Alden operated his crane, he kept an eye on the balance of the crew. For sure, Flannery was out of commission for the rest of the day. Alden wasn’t getting paid or earning seniority as the assistant foreman since it was unofficial, but that was how it panned out. On a job like this, safety was a big concern. He had two helpers who hooked up the chains so he could lift each section of track from the beat-up old gondolas and settle them in place to be bolted and hammered down.

Those guys were definitely in harm’s way. One false move on Alden’s part could crush a man against the side of the car, trap and shatter a leg, or knock the hapless worker off to fall ten or fifteen feet onto the rocky ground. Alden wasn’t totally happy with the current pair, two Indian boys, but they were the best of the lot so far. He hoped he’d drilled safety into their skulls enough that some of the rules would stick.

It didn’t help the work that Flannery had his pets, a couple of good-looking young Mexican guys and one blond kid who was said to be shirttail kin to Mr. Harmon or Mr. Mills, the owners of the SJSW. Everyone figured the Anglo boy was some kind of stoolie for the bosses, so they watched what they said around him. He didn’t do much work anyway and tagged after Flannery most of the time, usually with a clipboard and a bunch of papers. Maybe he was starting to do part of the paperwork for which the foreman was responsible.

Rumor had it Flannery was porking—or at least getting blown—by the two Mexicans. Alden didn’t know whether that was true or not. Alden figured they might also be Flannery’s link to some good Mary Jane out of Mexico. He did know they didn’t do a hell of a lot of work, but that wasn’t his concern. As long as the track got rebuilt or fixed properly, he couldn’t care less. He took pride in his work and had the experience to know how to do it right. Most days, he gave the company a full shift and then some. He never doubted he earned his checks.