Maybe you saw the picture in the newspaper. In the metro section, page two. An x-ray of somebody’s head, a side view. You see the skull, how it curves from front to back to hold the brain, but you don’t see the brain, x-rays go right through it. You see the eye socket and the nose bones, the way they always look broken off because most of your nose is soft stuff, cartilage or whatever, and you see the teeth. It’s all a little bit blurry, the way x-rays are, I don’t know why. Behind one ear there’s something that doesn’t belong. Something long and thin and dark and the edges are clear and sharp. It’s a sixteen-penny nail, and it goes straight into the skull.
         We’re working construction, framing a house. No hard hats. It’s residential construction, nobody wears a hardhat. Four guys on a framing crew, two guys on the roof, framing the rafters in, and Shawn and me’re doing interior walls on the first floor. I’m framing in a walk-in closet that’s bigger than my bedroom, and Shawn’s cutting studs for the home theater. It’s somebody’s dream house, with ten foot ceilings so you can’t use factory cut studs, they all have to be cut out of longer sticks.
         The compressor’s running off and on, mostly on, because we’re all of us using nail guns, and the compressor’s so loud you have to shout to be heard. If you’ve never heard a compressor think of working next to a dirt bike wound out in fourth gear with a hole in the muffler and you’ll about have it. At least once a day it’ll shut off right when somebody’s yelling over it. Makes you feel brainless when you’re halfway through a sentence and shouting way too loud.
         The way a nailgun works is you hold the gun up tight to the wood and you pull the trigger. The guns look like giant staplers, not the kind on your desk but the kind your dad had in his toolbox. The nails come on paper belts like machine gun ammo. You pull the trigger, and the gun makes a hollow snap, the sound of the compressed air driving the nail into the wood. One squeeze of the trigger and the nailhead is snapped in flush.
         The guys on the roof are Luert, the Dutchman, and this guy Curtis that Luert hired the day before. The guy Curtis is filling in for is Mike, but Mike told us all last Friday, down at The Red Penguin where we all go to drink beer after work, that he’s not coming back.
         “What do you mean, not coming back?” Luert says.
         “I got surgery on Monday,” Mike says. Mike’s this kind of morose guy who must be forty-five or better. Been a damn framer his whole life. Drinks red wine instead of beer, but other than that he’s a pretty regular guy.
         “Surgery,” Luert says. “What kind of surgery?”
         “Rotator cuff,” Mike says.
         Rotator cuff is bad. Rotator cuff is one of those injuries you read about on the sports page, usually right after the words ‘career ending’.
         Mike’s rubbing his upper lip with the stub of his pointer finger. A couple days before he shaved off the mustache he’s had as long as I’ve known him. He still doesn’t look right to me. He’s rubbing his upper lip like he can’t believe there’s no hair there.
         “Why didn’t you tell me?” Luert says. Luert’s drinking his usual, a shot of gin with a beer chaser. He’s the only guy I ever met who drinks straight shots of gin. He holds the shot glass in his left hand with his pinky finger sticking out. He shakes his head and he says “Lot of framers tear up the rotator cuff.” He finishes off his shot, and he says “When are you coming back?”
         Mike’s staring off at the TV over the bar. There’s truck races on the TV, these tricked out pick-ups with all this chrome and engines that poke up out of the hood. They’re going at it on a dirt track, and mud sprays everywhere. Mike shakes his head back and forth, just this little movement, almost like the palsy my granddad had.
         “I told you, I ain’t coming back,” he says. “I’m through framing. My body can’t take it no more.”
         So we got Curtis. A new guy comes on the crew, you don’t know what to expect. Shawn and me got hired about the same time, nearly a year ago, and Mike broke us in. I didn’t even know how to snap a line when I got this job. Most of what I know about framing Mike taught me. Luert spends half his time on his cell phone, lining up work, calling suppliers, sitting in the cab of his pick-up with the windows rolled up so the compressor isn’t so loud.
         This Curtis, he’s from the pierced and tattooed crowd. Got enough metal in his face to be a damn lightning rod up there on the roof. Maybe the gun misfired, which is what Curtis says, or maybe Curtis fucked up. The gun’s got a safety on it, and a deadman switch, but the bottom line is, you touch the trigger and the gun’s going to shoot a nail.
         Luert says when he turned around Curtis was just standing there with the gun at his side, didn’t even know what had happened. But I saw Shawn go down. The walk-in closet I’m framing has pocket doors that slide right into the wall, so I’m measuring for the extra width. Shawn’s up a ladder, filling all the holes in the joist hangers. He didn’t have to be there doing that, but he had the tico nails in his tool belt, and he figured he might as well catch it while he was up there nailing in the top plate.
         The compressor shuts off and it’s quiet, except for the snap snap snap of a nail gun above us, which is Curtis nailing off the rafter tails. Then that noise stops, and there’s birds making noise in the trees at the edge of the lot, and Curtis’ steps as he walks a ceiling joist over our heads.
         One more snap. I look over at Shawn for no particular reason, maybe I felt him staring at me. It’s one of those frozen moments in time kind of moments. Shawn reaches up real slow to touch the top of his head.
         “What the fuck?” he says. And then he tilts his head back and looks up into the joists, and Curtis is up there looking down at him, standing almost right over Shawn, and you can’t tell me Curtis didn’t know right then exactly what happened. I went over to Shawn, he was backing down the ladder, and when he got to the bottom he squatted straight down onto the floor, his legs folding up underneath him like one of those high lift trucks they use on the big commercial jobs. His hand still touched his head. I pull his hand away and there’s a thin trickle of blood down the side of his head. His hair’s about three eighths of an inch long, so it’s easy to see. The shiny round head of a sixteen-penny sinker. The nail head is all that shows, which means there’s three-and-a-half inches of nail buried in his skull.
         That little trickle of blood. Not a gusher like you think of head injuries usually being a bloody mess. I take my T-shirt off and hand it to him to use until the paramedics show up.
         Any of us could’ve done what the doctor did. Pulling nails is something we do all day long.
         None of the guys I work with have all their fingers, except Shawn. Among the building trades framers are the worst, although you see it from foundation guys to finish carpenters. It’s usually the pointer finger or the middle finger that’s missing. One knuckle gone you don’t notice so much. Luert, I worked with him for weeks before I noticed his first finger was missing the last knuckle. Right handed guys, they’re mostly missing digits on the left hand. You watch how they work, how they kneel on one knee and lay a piece of plywood across their other leg so they can’t even see it and then make the cut with a power saw. You make hundreds of cuts some days, zip zip zip, and you get to where carpentry is your hands and your tools working together like they don’t even need the rest of you, and you get this rhythm going where it’s like your brain is humming along on cruise control and you feel like you could work this way forever.
         Mike was missing the pointer finger on his left hand down to below the first knuckle. The stub worn as smooth as drain rock. I asked him one time how it happened, and he shrugged and said “I screwed the pooch.” But you check out all our saws. Framers all use a worm drive saw, because it’s got more torque, and they all stick a nail in the blade guard so it’s permanently retracted. Strictly against the safety regs, but it makes production faster, and framing is all about production. So when you fire that saw up the blade isn’t exposed just at the cutting surface, it’s exposed for a full quarter turn above that. And if you forget and stick your finger out where it shouldn’t be, well, forget about pulling it back.
         I still got all mine. Knock on wood.

They took Shawn to emergency. He was sitting up, he was talking, he told Curtis that if he’d wanted a piercing he would’ve at least gotten some hot looking chick to do it for him, not some troglodyte like Curtis. If the nail would’ve killed him, or made him brain damaged, you’d never see that picture in the newspaper. It’s surviving that got Shawn’s x-ray into the paper.
         My wife wakes up early the next morning. Becca’s eight months pregnant, our first, and she doesn’t sleep too good most nights, so mornings she sleeps in. Most mornings I’m gone before she ever rolls out of bed. She touches my arm and asks if I’m awake. I roll over on my side, and she’s got that heebie jeebie look in her face, her eyes are all the way open but she’s looking at something that’s not even in the room.
         “Bad dream?” I ask her. She keeps having these dreams where there’s all these baby mice, like she opens a drawer or something and there they are, pink and naked and blind and squirmy, and the mama mouse is busy eating one of them.
         “Don’t go,” she says. “Don’t go to work.”
         I have to go, I tell her. We’re barely making it as it is, and with the baby coming I got to work every hour I can. Her fingers are wrapped around my wrist like I’m the top rung on a fully extended thirty-two foot ladder.
         “Stay home,” she says. “Start looking for another job.”
         I kiss her knuckles, and then I peel her fingers off one by one. I bring her ginger tea and a bowl of rice krispies with strawberries and sugar. I tell her where the jobsite is, and to come by at lunchtime, we’ll eat together. I look back at her from the doorway when I leave, and she’s chewing rice krispies, and she has a drop of milk at the corner where her lips meet.

My old man wanted me to go to college, he was real big on that. My old man with his B.A. and his loan officer job, who majored in business and then never went on to became a CPA, like he planned. Certified Public Accountant, Christ on a stick, that’s no kind of a dream for a man to have.
         The bottom line is, I tried college but it didn’t work out. I sat there in lecture halls for a whole school year listening to some dude halfway to being a professor talk about all the stuff he’d learned out of books. I sat there pretending to take notes while I doodled floor plans for a little nine hundred square foot efficiency house I figured I could build myself for under twenty grand.
         After my freshman year I came home to a summer job my old man had found for me. Some architect guy he knew that would let me empty his wastebaskets and go out for lattes. My old man and me, we sat down at the kitchen table and had the big powwow about my future. He sat there with the top button of his white shirt unbuttoned and his tie hanging down like a leash. His fingernails trimmed all nice and even but brown from all the cigarettes he smokes, and blue inkstains on his fingertips from all the writing he does while he sits at his desk in the bank.
         “Look,” he says, “You’re too smart to be a carpenter. Your grandfather would roll over in his grave if he thought you’d settle for less than a college degree. If you want to be a builder, that’s great, but why not start at the top?”
         For the privilege of breathing the same air as the three architects at the firm I was paid $5.35 an hour. The only thing I liked about that job was the smell of the blueprints when they came fresh out of the copy machine.
         My first paycheck was three hundred and forty-two dollars. Three hundred and forty-two dollars for eighty hours of my life. I walked right out and got a job for twelve bucks an hour with a roofer, a guy named Helberg. Five ten-hour days a week and no overtime. But the twelve bucks was under the table, so a ten hour day meant a hundred and twenty take home.
         At the end of that first week I came home and laid six crisp hundred dollar bills on the kitchen table. My old man was sitting at the table smoking a cigarette.
         “I quit that architect job,” I said. “I got a real job. I’m a roofer now.”
         He picked one of the bills up and held it up to the light, like he was checking to see if it was real. “Well,” he said, “A roofer.” He took a big pull on his cigarette and blew the smoke out of the side of his mouth. In the year I’d been away at school most of his hair’d turned gray.
         “I roofed two and a half houses this week,” I said. “The guy I’m working for says he’ll keep us busy into October.”
         My old man gathered the money up from the table and made the edges all nice and neat. He folded it in half and handed it back to me. “What about school?” he said. “School starts in September.”
         September. I had a whole summer in front of me. Twelve weeks of solid work, I could clear six or seven grand easy. I had Becca, who couldn’t keep her hands off me, or me her. All I needed was a piece of dirt, just one fifty by a hundred lot. That and twenty grand and I was going to build us that little house.
         I never did go back to school.

The day he hired me Helberg told me to show him my hands. My hands were pretty soft. Doodling house plans doesn’t do much for your calluses.
         “How old’re you?” Helberg said. He was missing the last two fingers on his right hand, and the middle finger was missing a knuckle. Shaking hands with Helberg felt like grabbing a handful of chicken bones with the meat picked off.
         “Nineteen,” I told him.
         “You’re young, you’ll toughen up,” Helberg said. The stub of his middle finger was brown with tobacco stain. He said “All it takes to be a roofer is a strong back and a weak mind.”
         I laughed, but Helberg said “You think I’m joking?”
         I got married on Helberg’s money, worked for him for three years. Then I met Luert, I kept running into him at jobsites, him and Mike. The trades are like that, certain guys tend to work for certain builders and you keep running into the same faces all the time. I went out drinking with Luert and Mike one Friday, and Luert offered me a job. Luert paid fifteen to start, and if you stayed six months you got health insurance.
         “You seem like a sharp kid,” Luert said. “Anybody who’s got a brain in his head figures out a way to get a job underneath the roof.”
         It was weeks before I figured out that framers spend about three quarters of their time building the walls and the joists and the rafters that support the roof, and it’s usually the next to last day on the job that you finally sheet the roof. So framers aren’t much better than roofers, marginally better maybe, but not by much. Luert had an answer for that too.
         “Roofers are all alcoholics,” Luert said.
         “Roofers and painters,” Mike said. He raised his wine glass and said “I’ll drink to that.”
         “The thing about framing,” Luert said, “Is you look back at the end of the day and you see exactly what you’ve built, clear as gin.”

When they did the ultrasound on Becca they gave us a videotape. We’re laying in bed one night with the lights off and we pop it into the VCR. Becca’s on her side with her hands holding the big mound of her belly. I have my arm around her, even though we’re both sticky with sweat. We’re naked with just a sheet covering us. I have my feet sticking out the bottom of the sheet so my big toes frame the TV.
         There’s our baby, ghosty white on a black screen. In the video he’s five months along, and he’s got all his parts. He’s floating inside Becca’s belly, in his own private ocean. He holds his hands out in front of his chest and his fingers are sticking out and you can see each knuckle plain as day. It’s like he’s just as amazed to see his hands as we are. His eyes are big black ovals inside the white of his skull. He turns from back to front and brings one leg up. There’s his foot, the toes splayed wide apart. For a second as he’s turning you can see the outline of his package, which is how we knew he was a boy.
         Becca wants to call him Henry, after me. She takes my hand off her shoulder and puts it on her belly. Part of him is bulging her belly out from the inside, it feels like a knee or an elbow.
         Sometimes Becca says she feels his fingers poking her. She says he’s like a blind man feeling for the doorbell in a new house, a house he doesn’t yet know. She says, “He’s looking for the way out.”
         After what happened to Shawn, Luert took Curtis off the roof and made him frame doorways and closets. That put me on the roof with Luert, nailing the sheeting. Curtis took to wearing a baseball cap and looking up at us all the time, like he was afraid we were going to shoot him. At the end of the week he quit. He said he was moving to Montana to work in a fireworks factory. Luert wrote him out his final check and Curtis folded it in half without even looking at it and stuffed it into his shirt pocket.
         “See you guys around maybe,” he said. I don’t know if I ever could’ve gotten used to looking at all those studs in his face. Both lips pierced, right in the center, a double stud through the middle of his nose, studs in his cheeks, below his eyes, and above his eyebrows. It was almost like there was another Curtis inside his skin, a Curtis made entirely of metal, and it was trying to break through.
         “Unbelievable,” Luert said, after Curtis got into his car and drove away. “A fireworks factory?” He shook his head. “They better have their workman’s comp paid up.”

Shawn took a week off and then came back. He has a black dot of a scab where the nail went in. He reaches into his pocket and he pulls out a baggie that’s all rolled up. He unrolls it, and he pulls out a nail, the nail the doctor pulled out of his head.
         “I kept it, dude,” he says. “I’m going to have it framed with the picture from the newspaper.”
         The nail looks like every other nail I’ve ever seen. “Smell it,” Shawn says. I smell it, but I don’t smell anything different, only the metal smell of the nail.
         “You don’t get like a fish smell off it?” Shawn says.
         “No,” I say.
         Shawn says “I showed it to my girlfriend and she said it smells like fish, but I can’t smell nothing either.”
         I hand him the nail back. He rolls it up in the baggie again.
         “You ready to go back to work?” I ask him.
         “That’s why I’m here,” he says.
         They shaved Shawn’s head at the emergency room and his hair is all stubbly. The scab on his head is about the size of the fingernail on my pinky. It’s dome shaped, and sticks up from his head.
         “You ever think about maybe getting a different job?” I ask.
         “Like what?” he says.
         Plumbers, electricians, sheet metal guys, cement guys, excavators, painters, there must be a couple of dozen specialties in the trades. Plumbers and electricians, you got to go through the apprenticeship program, but a lot of those jobs you can get hired on the spot and learn as you go.
         “I hear they’re looking for sheetrockers,” I say.
         “Sheetrockers,” Shawn says. He leans over and lets a wad of spit drop onto the dirt. He says “Only idiots hang sheetrock. Dude, at the end of the day, they look like they’ve been rolled in bird shit and dipped in sand.”
         You kind of have to know somebody to get into those apprenticeship programs. Somebody who’s already in that trade, who can sponsor you.
         “I guess framing is all right,” I say.
         “I like framing,” Shawn says. “It’s what I know.” He’s putting his tool belt on. The baggie with the nail from his head starts to fall out of his pocket, and he catches it and stuffs it back in.
         “If I ever see Curtis again,” Shawn says, “I’m going to make him eat this nail.”

The house we’re working on still had windows to set, and a couple of walls to move because the homeowner was already making changes. That’s how it goes on these dream houses, the people who buy them have got money to burn, so if they don’t like how it is after it’s framed they’re not shy about having it changed and paying the backcharges.
         Luert put Shawn and me on the windows in the morning, and then Shawn took off for a doctor’s appointment. Luert was long gone, chasing down some more work. I finished the new walls up and then I sat on the peak of the roof and smoked a cigarette. I pictured Becca with the baby in her arms, standing in front of the house I was going to build for us. I listened to the birds, and I tried to think what it was I wanted to name the baby. I wasn’t sure if Henry Jr. was right.
         A beater of a car parked in front of the house and Mike got out. His arm was in a sling. He stood there and looked at the house. He didn’t see me on the roof, so I yelled out ‘Hey’ to him, and he yelled ‘Hey’ back. He came up the ladder with one hand while I steadied it from the top. We stood a couple feet back from the edge of the roof, where the pitch went from three-twelve to seven-twelve.
         “How’s your shoulder?” I said.
         He looked at his shoulder in this funny way, like he was surprised to see it there. “It hurts,” he said. “They got me doped up on pain pills. They said it stapled together pretty good.” He reached up and pushed his shirt sleeve up and rubbed his shoulder. Wasn’t much of a scar, a white line that had a slight ‘s’ curve to it, and the skin on either side was bruised yellow. “It ain’t all that bad,” he said. “If I get eighty percent use of it back they call that a success.”
         He was just starting to let his mustache grow back in. I told him about Shawn getting shot in the head with the nailgun, and about the picture in the newspaper. He said, “It figures you guys would screw things up without me around.” He rubbed the stub of his finger on the stubble of his mustache.
         “You coming back to work for Luert?” I asked him.
         “No way,” Mike said. “Too much heavy lifting.” He was standing, looking up the pitch at the sheeting on the roof. He said “You need some blocking up there where the plywood buckles at the seam.”
         “Okay,” I said. I counted the sheets of plywood up to where the buckle was, so I’d know from underneath where to put the blocking. I said, “So if you’re not coming back to work here, what are you going to do?”
         “I know this finish carpenter,” Mike said. “Says he’ll hire me when my shoulder heals up enough. Ain’t so much heavy lifting.”
         A finish carpenter. Finish carpenters come in at the end and make everything look nice. They come in after the sheetrock is taped and textured and the painters are done. They put up the moldings and case the windows and doors. It’s all miter cuts and getting a really tight fit in the corners, and building stairs and mantles and cabinets.
         Finish carpenters were usually older guys, guys with gray hair. Their pick-ups were always set up nice, to carry their tools. From a finish guy I’d learn enough so I could trick my nine hundred square foot house out really nice.
         I could only think of one who didn’t have all his fingers.

First Published in Berkeley Fiction Review

Stevan Allred is a writer, teacher, landlord, father, husband, tractor owner, and gardner who lives in the woods between Fischer’s Mill and Viola, Oregon. He has just finished a writer’s residency at the Portland Night High School, where he encouraged his students to write about skateboarding, BMX bikes, restaurant work, and what to say to the cops if you get stopped at 3 a.m. and your back seat is full of shaving cream cans and 24-packs of toilet paper. His fiction, poetry, and journalism has appeared in many small journals, most recently Berkeley Fiction Review, The Text, and The Portland Mercury. He will have a piece of flash fiction in the summer issue of The Gobshite Quarterly.