After lunch, Brady and Jason were finishing punch-out on a two-story duplex, which consisted of checking for holidays around the exterior. The sun was on the south side of the structure and revealed a sizeable holiday on the gable up near the peak of the roof. They’d need the 35-foot ladder to reach it.
When Brady walked around the corner from the front side of the building holding his cut pot, his face and neck were red from the unrelenting sun frying his pale skin.
“We got a holiday up there,” Jason said, nodding toward it.
“You rolled that, right?”
“That was Derek. I did the other one,” Brady said, trying not to let the insinuation get to him. When he started this painting job, he’d noticed how - compared to other trades - the experienced guys tended to micromanage, and often did so in the most irritating way possible. In a way, it was the nature of the work: training the eyes for straight, monotonous lines and holidays on vast walls that only painters themselves would notice. You could polish a turd with paint and get away with a lot, but it was also the first thing you’d noticed.
“I’ll go up and hit it. Jerry took all the roller setups. I can probably reach it with a brush.” Brady siad.
“I’ll do it. They don’t expect a lot out of you. It’ll come back to me anyway.”
That was the thing Brady had noticed as well. Everything with these guys, especially this guy, was undercut with an insult. Sure, Brady was new, but the jab at his character was intentional.
Jason, much to his own delusion, had been gunning for the position of foreman for the South end of the county.
“I’ll hold the ladder then.”
“Well, I’d hope so. Look at that gravel.”
“I see the gravel. That’s why I said it.”
“More perceptive than yesterday then. I’m sure you got those holidays you left by unit 3.”
Brady ignored the comment. He had hit the holidays this morning and had already been in his own head about missing the spots in the first place.
“Did you get those spots?”
“Sure did, boss.”
He couldn’t place it exactly. Ever since this guy joined the crew a month ago, Brady had been weighing the possibility. There were so many similarities - they shared the same name, Jason, the bald head, the bulging eyes, and a countenance that hid malice behind a mask of civility. It was a face he hadn’t thought about in more than twenty years.
It was like a secret between Brady and his mother. They had spoken of it once, quickly, hugged, and she had cried in the Publix parking lot before they walked in together.
When Jason reached the top of the ladder, Brady looked around. The golf course to his left was empty, as expected on a hot mid-afternoon day in Florida. He knew the tenants hadn’t yet returned since they’d left that morning, and the shades were drawn on the condo behind him. So he decided to ask.
“Hey, Jason.”
“What,” Jason replied as he reached out with his brush over twenty feet from the ground.
“Did you ever own piranhas?”
Jason stopped his reach and looked down at Brady, confused, almost as if he’d been caught in the act of something.
“Yeah. Wh-”
Brady hooked his heel on the left rail of the ladder and pulled it into his heel, causing the tips of the ladder to pull away from the building. Jason had a brush in his right hand and his cut pot in his left. The only things stabilizing him were his knees pressing into the inside of the rails and the confidence that Brady was holding the ladder in place.
Jason screamed as he fell from the top of the ladder into the bushes and rocks. Some part of him caught the corner of the AC unit.
Brady dug the feet of the ladder into the gravel to stabilize it and went to check on Jason. He was concussed and barely awake. His left arm was broken above the wrist and contorted. His collarbone protruded through the skin, white as ivory and leaking a large amount of blood.
He knelt down and looked at him in his dirty, scraped face.
Jason mumbled something incoherent.
“Looks like you might bleed out. Before you do, I have a question. Do you remember Nichole? Nichole Hansen. Brady isn’t my first name - it’s Shawn.”
Jason’s eyes lit up and his lips quivered, but nothing came out.