From Bars to Bands

Ten people come home. Ten trades. Ten walls that have nothing to do with what anybody thinks of them.

A commercial diver can own half a company and is forbidden by a federal statute about dynamite to own the other half. A boxing trainer holds a state license to work a professional corner and will never be allowed in the corner of the fifteen-year-old he raised. A woman runs the crews that clean an airport terminal at four in the morning and cannot walk into it. A grandmother is kept out of the house she grew up in by a line in a background check rule.

They learn to weld under water, read a credit report, find a property line that two men agreed to in 1911, cut along a seam, keep four trillion bacteria alive, and tell a fighter exactly one thing. Then they find out that the wall is not a person. It is a statute, a licensing board, an underwriting sheet, a box on page four - and there is nobody in the building to be mad at.

Two of them do not get past it. Two of them never own anything at all, and are as far out as anybody in these books ever gets.

The Ground Controls is the third volume of From Bars to Bands. Each volume stands alone.