Two-Up

"Yesterday Broadstreet saw a laborer from the union hall lose a finger in the gunite pump," beings Two-Up, the story of Harold Broadstreet, a gunite construction worker in San Francisco who drinks his aches away. When the crew's foreman is fired, Broadstreet becomes the foreman of a falstaffian militia of rogues, ex-cons, Vietnam vets and Mexican immigrants. He tries his best to do his job honorably, but is repeatedly thwarted by circumstance and by Rex, an ageless worker who is blackmailing the gunite company's owner. When megalomaniacal Colby Root - an Ahab for our times - replaces Broadstreet as the new foreman, it's clear he's been hired to do more than just run a gunite crew, and the construction site becomes a battlefield for a final showdown.