Chapter 21

My Dad had an extremely tough first week. Not because the work I had him doing was so difficult, but because it was very different from what he was used to doing when working. He told me how difficult it was for him to write checks for some of the material invoices. He just wasn't used to writing checks for those amounts of money.

I gave him the keys to the flat bed truck, my big company checkbook and the Thomas Brothers map book on that first Monday morning, sending him off to pay for and pick up everything we'd need for our building materials for Tuesday and Wednesday.

I had written up a list of where he needed to go, along with the addresses, and told him that I'd routed them in the order he needed to follow. I told him that the suppliers were responsible for loading and tying down each order onto the truck. I warned him things to watch out for when he checked the orders. By then, most suppliers knew that I wouldn't tolerate any quality less than what I'd ordered. The ones that didn't understand this, they no longer got any of my business. I wasn't expecting him to have any trouble.

When he got back in the flat bed, I had four of my guys handle the unloading for him. Each crew knew what they'd be needing for the next two days, and would come over to where the material had been placed. I kept a pad and pencil to write down what each crew was taking. Small things like a box of nails, or conduit and flashing I didn't pay too much attention to. Interior doors and hardware were accounted for, as were most electrical and plumbing materials. I trusted my crews, but I wanted to know where things were, in case one crew accidentally took something ordered for a different one.

For his second run, after lunch, my father went to pick up a load of lumber and some wall board. When he returned, I had all six crews unload what they needed from off the truck, then carry it over to the job site they were working on. I'd found, over the years, that each crew knew best where they wanted the following days materials placed. It sure did cut down on the complaints and blaming when anything turned up missing.

I could tell my father was impressed when he got a chance to watch each of the crews working. It wasn't difficult to see how well choreographed and efficient the crew movements were. This was the advantage of only using very experienced teams. Each knew what the other did best, and they allocated responsibilities according to what would get the job done the quickest and easiest. On things they had to both work together on, the same standards would apply. There was always one guy more comfortable going low, while the other went high. Divided up into each man's strengths, the end result approached perfection.

I spent that first day roaming from site to site, assisting where needed, and roughing in electrical boxes and pulling some conduit from some of the rooms over to the main electrical box. Nothing I did was anything any of the crew members couldn't have done themselves, but it saved them time by not having to do all the preparation work themselves. The time saved this way made it easier for the crews to take their breaks, and meant they could more easily stay on schedule. I'd found three or four small breaks each day increased, rather than lowered, their productivity. I knew it had helped mine, back when I was swinging a hammer for twelve to fourteen hours each day.

After you've been building houses for a few years, you can walk through a job site and know where you are in the building process. By the end of Monday, I knew we were a little ahead of the building pace I had planned for. Its always a good feeling to find that you have some elasticity in your forward scheduling. Things will always come up to throw a monkey wrench into a contractor's schedule.

At home, Dorothy and Sonia had everything under control. The kids were performing well in school, and weren't squabbling that much with each other at home. I was hoping that all this peace, harmony, and tranquility would last, but I wasn't counting on it.

By the end of that first week of my father working, I was starting to feel pretty good about hiring him. The job he did for me, not counting writing out the checks, was actually worth about twelve dollars an hour. With him writing the checks, that freed me up to do other things, I probably saved fifteen hours per week that would have been spent dealing with unpaid invoices and inspecting shipments. I could just leave him on site with the company checkbook too, that saved me having to wait around for any COD deliveries we had called in.

I was paying my father $750,00 a week. With deductions for State and Federal taxes, Social Security, and Disability, he cleared right at $500.00 every Friday. When he got his first paycheck I saw him carefully looking at all the deductible items. He seemed satisfied as he folded it up and put it in his shirt pocket.

That weekend something happened over at Dorothy's parents house. One of her brothers, the middle one, Carl, decided that his oldest sister, Gail, hadn't been showing him the proper deference he believed was his due. To teach her a lesson, and make an example of her for their mother and other sister, he beat her, to the point where Dorothy's father believed he needed to take her to the hospital.

The way I later heard it, the sisters transgression had been to spend too long in the bathroom, when the brother needed to pee. He could have used the bathroom in the parents bedroom, but he apparently didn't want to upset his father. He beat her pretty severely, blacking one of her eyes, causing her nose to bleed, and making her separate her shoulder when she was knocked backwards and fell into the bathtub.

At the hospital, Gail told the doctor that she had slipped and fallen in the tub while showering. No reports were made to the police. Dorothy told me that her father told Gail that she got exactly what she deserved, and that he hoped she had learned from the experience.

Back home, after Gail told her mother and sister what her father had said to her, the Ross woman once again tried to stage a mutiny. This was put down with a lot of shoving and pushing, with the father taking an old electrical cord and lashing out at both of his daughters, as well as his wife. None of their physical injuries required medical attention, but all three women seethed at the treatment they'd received.

After a flurry of phone calls, back and forth between Dorothy, Sonia, Gail and their mother, Dorothy was elected to bring the problem before me. Somehow, mostly because Dorothy believed I was stronger (more powerful), than her uncle, her brothers and her father, they had all decided that I should be the one to determine what was fair, and could then hand down my ruling.

Both Dorothy and Sonia believed that all the parties would abide by whatever I had decided. I thought they were both loony tunes to think that. Dorothy reminded me that she had gone along when I had changed everything in the way I operated my business in order to give my father his new job.

It was late Sunday night when I finally gave up and promised the two women that I'd go over to their parents house and get things straightened out. They agreed that it could wait until after I had everything sorted out and running smoothly over at the job site.

Dorothy and Sonia would see the three oldest children safely off to school, then we'd all meet over at my mother's, at ten o'clock. Our youngest, who we now called Buzz (his name was Bellamy), would stay with my mom, while the three of us would go over and talk to the women, who were all staying home from work that day.

When Dorothy's mother let us in the house it was easy to see that no one had picked anything up or done any cleaning for awhile. Apparently all of the women were on some kind of sit down strike. Gail's face looked pretty battered. There was actually a small cut on the bridge of her nose, and her shiner had blossomed with several interesting colors. Her right arm and shoulder were held in a sling. Danielle, Dorothy's other older sister, seemed the most cowed by the weekend events. The other two, mother and eldest daughter, made it clear that they were flat out pissed off.

I listened to what all the women had to say. What it amounted to was that they believed nobody had a right to beat them, and to hit them on their back and legs with lamp cords. They wanted me to do something to put an end to such abuse.

I hadn't realized it before, but Dorothy had been talking me up to the female members of her family for years. Because of that, I think they thought of me as some kind of super being who was all powerful. I also found out that they all knew that I was fucking Sonia too, and that Dorothy was allowing it. For some reason, knowing this gave me more power in their eyes.

I finally agreed that I would have a talk with the men when they came home for their noon meal. I didn't want to do any of this, but Dorothy had me over a barrel because if I didn't do it, she would hold what I had done for my father over my head for years.

When Dorothy's father and her three brothers came home just before twelve, they had no forewarning that the three of us were waiting for them, in addition to the three that they expected to be there.

"What are you doing here? This is none of your business, get out of my house!" Dorothy's father was looking very angry and upset. The look he gave his wife and two eldest daughters spoke volumes about who he'd hold responsible for bringing enemies inside his home. Carl looked nervous. His eyes never left my face. The youngest son, Roger, was slowly moving backwards, edging towards the front door he'd just come through. The oldest son, Abel, moved up in support of his father. I simply stood where I was.

"The women asked me to come. They wanted me to decide on a fitting punishment for what you and Carl did to them. I wanted to hear your side of things, before I made up my mind."

"Get out of my house! I will call the police."

"That might be best. I'll explain what I was told happened, then they can take it from there. I think I told you before, when you were letting your brother pimp your daughters out to that group of old men back in Iran, that you can't do things like that to people here in America. You can't beat the shit out of women because you need to take a piss, and you can't hit them with lamp cords, if they tell you something that you don't want to hear."