Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [27]
Pretty Boy, whose real name was Mariano Idone, tried to control the shaking in his hand as he reached for his oilcan. Nunzio noticed and offered, “Pretty Boy, I positioned most of these jacks, why don’t you stay around the edge and I’ll go in.”
Pretty Boy stared at Nunzio and quietly said, “Alright Profes sore, if you think so.”
Nunzio slithered on his back under the disc and headed for the center. He used his heels on the concrete and his palms on the metal tank bottom to propel himself through the space. He held the oilcan in his mouth. It was dark, and the few inches that were lost with the lowering of the disc made a huge difference in the amount of air and anxiety that flowed through his body. To keep going, Nunzio was forced to use a mental trick Giovanna had taught him that she used with women in labor. His body was sandwiched between sun-scorched steel and concrete, but he visualized himself sitting with Giovanna on the cliffs of Scilla. A sea breeze cooled them, carrying the smell of lemons.
The laborers above were instructed to lower the tank an inch while the men underneath oiled the cups and checked the jack pins to ensure they were working. The strain of the jacks on the metal was amplified beneath the disc. Nunzio’s head felt like it was going to explode from the noise and the heat. It was almost pitch dark under the disc, but when Nunzio saw how the pins played loosely in the cups, he knew he had found the problem. He decided to check one other jack cup before telling the foreman. Nunzio shimmied over to the next jack. He glimpsed the bottom of a boot and called out.
“Do the pins seem okay to you?”
“I can’t see a thing, I’m getting out of this goddamn inferno,” came Lagato’s voice.
“I’ll be right behind you.”
Aboveground, Supervisor Mulligan noticed that the strain on the jacks and screw logs had not changed. He was furious with the engineer for backing him into this problem. It wasn’t his fault it was taking so long; the engineers had come up with a lousy idea. Mulligan decided to tell them he was stopping the job until they came up with a better plan and marched off to the office to call.
Nunzio had checked a second jack cup and found the pin just as loose. “No oil is going to help this situation,” he thought. “They’re strained.”
It was going to be a long crawl out from under the disc. His panic worsened, making it harder to get out, so he narrowed his mind’s focus to the blue of Scilla’s water, skies, and Giovanna’s eyes. He stared at the blue and heard the rushing sound of the tide through small stones that seemed to sing “Ssh-illa.” Within seconds his concentration was shattered by a strange creaking sound.
“Forza!” yelled Nunzio into the dark. Curses and the sounds of desperate scrambling came in reply. Nunzio ripped the skin on his elbows, hands, and legs as he frantically tried to move his body faster along the concrete. The next few moments, like the metal inches above him, hung in the air. Nunzio felt the disc lurch westward and heave a heavy groan. He had a split second of recognition that he was going to die, and he let his mind flash onto the blue before all two hundred tons of steel heaved, fell, and crushed his body.
The police, firemen, and the laborers identified a few areas with minor elevations and worked in teams with heavy sledges and chisels to rip up the plates. An hour after the metal jacks and timbers had snapped like toothpicks and the tank bottom had crashed to the concrete, one rescue team had ripped up enough metal to locate a body. Work stopped and there was a hush when they brought Lagato into daylight. It was his clothes that held the pulp of Lagato’s body together. At the sobering sight of the first body reduced to a fleshy mass, work slowed, perhaps because it was evident that survival was impossible or the thought of finding another man was too gruesome.
Carmine, however,