“Exactly what it says, Vince,” I said, and I laid my hand flat on the equipment schedule. “Ocasio Concrete Pumping was sold in November for twelve million six hundred thousand dollars. Every pump, every truck, every yard. Line twelve is the Putzmeister forty seven meter boom pump on the Mack chassis. It belongs to the buyer. Your son has it parked behind a warehouse with a price painted on the boom, and he told Luis that I approved it. I approved nothing.” I looked down at the water, where the pirate ship was turning slowly for the second pass. “I let you call me the mud man for thirty four years. I will not let you call me a thief.”
Vince set his rum down on the railing. “Manny, you never said a word. Not one word.” “You never asked,” I said. “You assumed. Thirty four years, Vince. I paid for half of the float every year, and I never said a word about that either.” Nick tried to laugh. “Uncle Manny, it was only a loan until my company got on its feet.” “Luis told me you took a line pump and a pickup truck too,” I said. “That is three pieces of equipment. The lawyer for the buyer is going to ask for them by Monday.” On the street below, the cannons fired again, and no one on the balcony so much as blinked.
Lisa came across the balcony and stood beside me. She did not say anything. She only took my hand, and I felt her fingers shaking. Her brother turned to his son. “Nick, you told me your uncle gave you the equipment. You told me it was your inheritance.” “I thought he would never use it,” Nick whispered. The pirate flags snapped in the wind. A cousin in an eyepatch took a step backward. Somewhere behind us a small child asked, in a bright clear voice, “Why is everybody quiet?” and her mother hushed her. Vince took off his pirate hat and held it against his chest.
A boom pump with a price painted on its side gave one nephew the weekend to bring his uncle back to the balcony on Bayshore.
I kept my voice level, the way I keep a boom steady in a crosswind. “Here are my terms. By Sunday night the pump comes back to the yard on Fiftieth Street, with the line pump and the pickup. Luis checks every item against the schedule. Nick pays the fuel and the haul himself. The name Ferlita Concrete Services does not get filed, not this year and not next, without a letter from the buyer. And Nick, you will apologize to the operators you lied to.” Nick nodded. His face was the color of wet cement. Vince stood still, as though he were reading the schedule for the first time and finding his own name on it.
On Sunday morning I drove to the yard, and I found a surprise waiting. All sixty of my operators had come in, on their day off, in their steel toed boots and company shirts. They had heard from Luis. They stood in two rows on either side of the gate, and as the boom pump rolled in, behind the tow truck of Nick, they took off their hard hats. A gray haired man named Hector, who had run a line pump for me for twenty six years, stepped forward. “Manny,” he said, “you never missed a payday. We would have lifted that truck on our backs.” Nobody had told me that anyone noticed.
The money consequences were not light. Vince had co signed the lease on the warehouse and the loan for the trucking permits, and the bank called both within days. He had to borrow against the bakery to cover them, and the bakery that had stood on Seventh Avenue for a hundred years suddenly faced a hard winter. The concrete supplier who had extended credit to Ferlita Concrete Services sent a bill for forty two thousand dollars. The float for next Gasparilla was quietly canceled. For the first time in fifty years, the Ferlita name was missing from the parade.
I did not want to be a hard man. With part of the sale money, I started a fund for the people who build this city. The Ocasio Trades Fund pays for apprenticeships in concrete work, welding and heavy equipment operation for any young person in Hillsborough County who wants a trade and cannot afford the school. The first class had thirty four students, and eleven of them were women. I told them that I had started by pushing a wheelbarrow, and that the best view in Tampa is from the fortieth floor of something you poured yourself.
Vince came to see me alone on a Wednesday evening, with a tray of guava pastries. He stood in my kitchen in his baking apron, flour on his forearms. He told me he had been jealous of me since I married his sister, because I had a company and a crew, and he had a bakery that his father left him. I told him that I had always envied the smell of his shop at five in the morning. He laughed and wiped his eyes. Then he said, “Manny, I am sorry,” and I said, “Eat a pastry,” and we sat down at the table like brothers.
Nick came to the yard on the first Monday at five in the morning, as I had asked. Hector handed him a pressure washer and pointed at a boom pump that had been through the winter. For six hours he blasted off the hardened concrete, and by noon his arms were shaking. At lunch he sat on an overturned bucket with a sandwich in his hand. Hector sat down beside him and said, “It is not about who gets the credit, kid. It is about whether the slab is level.” Nick looked at his raw red hands. “Yes sir,” he said, and I saw him grow up a little.
The next Gasparilla, the Ferlita float was back on Bayshore Boulevard, with the old family banner and a new one beside it that read Ocasio Concrete, Proudly Pumping Tampa Since 1991. Lisa waved from the deck with a string of gold beads. Nick sat in the cab of the boom pump at the end of the parade, number twelve gleaming on the outrigger, a proud and humbled man. Vince raised his glass from the balcony. “To the mud man!” he shouted, and this time the whole crowd cheered with him. I tipped my cap, and the pirate ship fired its cannons.
