Page 13 of The Lineman

I suppose it didn’t really matter. I liked the job. Always had. It was real, tangible work—fix something, and it stayed fixed. There were no meetings, no office politics, just hard work, problem-solving, and a damn good view from the top of a pole.

I rolled into the crew yard at 6:15 a.m. sharp, coffee in one hand, breakfast biscuit in the other. The air was thick with diesel and sweat, and guys were already milling around, checking gear and shooting the shit before the morning briefing.

“Look who decided to show up,” Gerald, my crew chief, called. “What, Hart? You get lost on the way here?”

I took a long sip of coffee before answering. “Just wanted to give you a head start. Figured you needed the handicap.”

The other guys laughed. Gerald grunted and shot me a bird. “Smart-ass.”

I grinned and climbed into the work truck, checking the day’s job list. It looked like we had a fairly routine day—some maintenance work, a couple of outages from a tree branch that took down a line, and a transformer swap on the east side of town.

A solid day.

Or, at least, it should have been.

My first call was a classic case of nature versus electricity. A big maple tree in some guy’s backyard had decided to give up on life and drop a massive limb straight onto the power lines. The homeowner, a guy in his sixties wearing cargo shorts and socks with sandals, greeted us with a nervous chuckle. “Didn’t think a little wind would do that.”

Gerald, who had no patience for fools, just grunted. “Yeah. Funny how trees work.”

I climbed up, maneuvering through the tangled mess, carefully detaching the branches from the line before we could restring it. It wasn’t hard work, just tedious.

The homeowner stood below, hands on his hips. “Man, I’d do it myself, but my wife says I’m too old to be climbing ladders.”

I looked down at him. “Yeah, you’d definitely electrocute yourself.”

He laughed like I was joking.

I wasn’t.

After Mr. Sock-N-Sandals, we were sent to a mystery outage—one of those calls where no one had a clue what the problem was.

It turned out the problem was a guy named Harold.

Harold was a well-meaning but profoundly unqualified retiree who had attempted to install a new outdoor light. Instead, he had somehow managed to cut power to his entire street.

“Ah, hell,” he said when we knocked on his door. “I was just tryin’ to replace a bulb!”

“You rewired the whole box,” Gerald pointed out.

“Ah,” Harold said, nodding solemnly. “That’d do it, won’t it?”

We worked the repair, and Harold promised never to touch electricity again.

We left, unsung heroes once more.

By noon, I found myself sitting in the truck bed eating a ham sandwich and drinking a Gatorade, staring out over a job site. Gerald had wandered off to—who the fuck knew?

The quiet of the day washed over me like a warm bath.

And that’s when Mrs. H’s words popped into my head.

“What about that new boy on the street? Mike something? He seemed cute.”

I took a bite of my sandwich.

“Clumsier than a baby giraffe in a glassware shop.”

I smiled.

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