Part of it was simple: something heavy was on his chest, pinning him down, not quite crushing him but making his efforts to breathe more labored. Dust burned his eyes, but he could not free his hands to wipe them.
It was the numbness in his lower body that worried him more than any pain. His fear was controllable for the moment, but his
immobility was filling him with a haunting despair, the source of which he could not quite identify.
He tasted the sudden saltiness of his tears. He was embarrassed, until he remembered that there was no one around to witness his weakness. For some reason that made him angry, so he let the anger build up in him and used it to focus his energy.
Although his mouth was dry and his tongue swollen, he worked up some saliva and spat. The spit fell back on his cheek, and trickled towards his temple. He was pinned at an angle, on his back, head downward.
Rocking upward he pinched his left hand, but the movement back freed it. He discovered he could wriggle his fingers. He tried it again... the hand moved a little more.
One more time and his left hand was free, then the right. He touched his face. There was no pain, but lots of blood, some thick and dirt-caked, some fresh. This new discovery created new worries: with the blood flowing to his downward-angled head wound, how long before he passed out? He had to get himself upright.
He flexed and shook out his hands, then grabbed the blue sack on his chest and pulled, rocking it off his body until it rolled free and down the dusty rock incline.
It was then that he saw that it was not a sack at all, but a man’s body clad in blue dungarees. He couldn’t tell who it was because the upper half of the torso had been ripped away by something heavy and sharp.
Scott felt an enormous sadness at the sight. He could sit up but he couldn’t move for the large, telephone-pole size piece of timber pressing his legs into the hard earth. He recognized it as one of the spars of the collapsed bridge. His bridge.
With the corpse finally off him, Scott forced himself to look around and see how bad the wreck was.
The panorama of destruction was breathtaking-the wrecked railroad cars, two camp cars, two supply cars, scaffold car, ballast-spreader, rail unloader, pile-driver, locomotive, coal car, and caboose, lay scattered about on the steep incline of the ravine. Across the ravine was what remained of the trestle bridge that Scott had designed and his crew had spent a month building. Scott could see that the network of trestles spanning the ravine had snapped as the train had crossed it, sending the cars plummeting down the deep gully.
Scott scanned the splintered bridge trestles, his eyes following the gnarled iron of the tracks bending downward into the ravine like metal spaghetti, the void where the bridge would be were it still standing, and the cars scattered below him on the incline. The violence of the crash had caused the work and supply cars to fracture and splinter as if they were made from balsa wood, flinging their contents down the ravine. He could see the locomotive just thirty yards above him, its boiler wheezing a sad, dying hiss.
He did not know how he had survived the wreck. Just a few feet away was the corpse whose dead weight would have suffocated him.
Scott wondered about the rest of the two dozen men in his crew. Frye, the sharecropper’s son who had never owned a pair of shoes until Jimmy had brought him in to work, or the Filiberto brothers from Nicaragua who Scott had heard say no more than ten words between them in two years and could unerringly path-find out of the deepest forest. Or the Russian they had nick-named Rasputin, who was impervious to the coldest temperatures, had a photographic memory and jet-black pinpoint eyes shining with terrible madness or boisterous mischief, depending on his appetite. These were men who could lift twice what a normal man could, and work full days in sub-zero, wind-whipped cold or stifling one hundred and ten-degree jungle humidity. They never complained, never took issue or gave excuses.
Scott and his partner Jimmy Shustak had picked up these men as they built bridges all over the world. As Jimmy said, their crew was “a real goddam league of nations,” a team of outsiders and loners. But these men also knew how to build, and even in the worst conditions they were the best: focused, methodical, clever and tough.
They did not care about color unless it was the green of money. They shared bunkhouses, food and clothes, hats, dishes, water, and tools. When they went to town they shared liquor, luck, and women. They lost fellows to avalanches, malaria, drowning, and snakebites. And each man’s loss drew the others closer until they became like brothers. Sudden death had made them a family, and now, in one final stroke, this family had ceased to exist.
It occurred to Scott that in their effort to finish the bridge he had never stopped to appreciate the beauty of the terrain-the raw glory of the Rocky Mountains: the vertical peaks surrounding the ravine, spring snow sugar-dusted along the barren, knife-edged crests, and down lower, along the tree line of ponderosa and spruce, the railroad tracks cut in and clinging to its sides. Half-buried on the side of the deep ravine, Scott felt like a flea caught in a fold of bed sheet: insignificant and unwelcome, a thing to be crushed and flicked away.
A few hours ago he had been the conqueror. With the last rail of the trestle laid and the last spike driven, the ravine was an equation he had solved with his bridge. It was a problem of terrain that he had overcome with iron and timber, the clarity of his intellect, and the strength of his crew.
Now the iron was twisted, the wood splintered, the crew dead and Scott on his back, pinned under the wreckage of what they had struggled to build.
They had been so close. It would have been a sweet deal. He and Jimmy could have paid off the last of their loans, owned their equipment outright, and, above all, cemented their reputation. Jimmy would have fulfilled his dream of having trumped Albert Dekker, their biggest competitor, whom they outbid for this, their biggest job. The contract guaranteed work for Jimmy, Alan and their men for years. It wouldn’t have been easy street, but it would have been damned close.
But the dream was carnage now, collapsed like the bridge around him. And Scott was trapped, forced to ponder the possibility that his flawed design caused this catastrophe.
Scott took a long, deep breath. He had to be prepared to be here for a while until relief came. The site was reachable by rail, assuming there was a locomotive to bring the rescue team up the grade. But it could be days. He couldn’t afford to go out of his head.
Aside from the timbers across his legs, he had dirt under him, but right beneath that was granite bedrock: he could not dig himself out from under the beam. The downslope side of his body pressed against a half-buried boulder. Pine needles were scattered about. He had nothing to drink and nothing to dig with. He was hopelessly pinned.
He surveyed the wreckage looming precariously above him on the steep slope. The locomotive was tipped frontside down, the front wedged deeply into the side of the ravine. Piled on top of it were the splintered remains of the work cars.
Scott could see one of the working cars on its side, its load of wooden rail ties, rebars and dozens of fifty-five-gallon drums of hot tar scattered down the incline. One of the casks on the ridge ten feet above him had split open. Gallons of steaming, molten tar spilled from it and oozed like molasses down the wreckage, dripping into puddles, seeping down the splintered pieces of timber, moving slowly and surely in his direction.
Panic moved Scott as he pushed harder against the timber pinning him, not caring about the immediate blunt pain as he tried to rock the pole off his legs. The pain he felt now would be nothing compared to what he would feel when that tar got to him, cooking him alive.
The spar pinning Scott would not budge. Spent from the effort to move it, Scott lay on his back, his blond hair streaked with dust, grime and sweat. The gallons of tar continued to drip, puddle and seep down the wreckage. Just a few feet above him now.
He’d fought against gravity his entire life. As an engineer, he sought to defy it, to make things stay up. But gravity was giving him a good screwing
today.
Scott laughed, the sharp bark surprising and scaring him even more than the tears had.
Tar dripped down on a piece of board above the timber. Scott could see that it was still scalding hot and fluid enough to continue moving. He calculated the speed of the drip and the angle of the board. The tar would be dripping onto his legs in about five minutes. Despair pulsed through him, making him weak, but it wasn’t just from the current predicament. Something from his past was squirming inside him, making his despair childlike, pungent, desperate in a way he hadn't known for a very long time.
He could taste the copper tang of fear and panic. Then a memory suddenly slotted into his consciousness. He was nine years old, newly arrived at Willoughby House. He was filled with anger—abandoned, unwanted and unloved. Shame smoldered inside him, fueling his defiance, distilling his ferocious anger at everybody and everything. He was quick to take on everyone-the other castoff boys, the teachers, even Headmaster Warden, who terrified all with his bull shoulders and giant cue ball head. But Alan welcomed the punishments and fights, thrived on the little victories against the bigger boys, of seeing the intimidation even in the warden’s eyes as each weathered method of making Alan submit failed.
One night, Ben Hartman and Tom Kimmel, two older boys who were fed up with Alan’s arrogance, decided to teach him the oldest lesson in the world. While he slept, they piled on him and pummeled him with fists, knees and feet. Alan did not mind the beating-he was used to that-but what they did to him next terrified him. Dragging him out of his bed and across the cold linoleum floor, they stuffed him in empty coal bin, slamming the lid shut and sitting on it. The space was as tight as a coffin. He could barely breathe and could not even bring his arms up to his face. As Kimmel sat on the lid, Hartmann took the wick out of an unlit lamp and poured the kerosene through one of the slats of the tin box. Alan sniffed the fumes of the liquid soaking into his chest and stomach, knowing instantly what it was and what they intended to do to him. Then the boys lit a match and held it above the slot for Alan to see, waiting for him to beg for mercy, cry uncle and submit.
But in spite his primal fright, Scott did not utter a sound.
The boys waited, sitting on the lid, giggling and ribbing each other, but they heard nothing and all they saw was Alan’s unblinking eyes staring through the slat. At first they thought Alan might just be stupid, so they took great pains to explain in detail what they intended to do to him. When he did not respond, they lit another match and dangled it above the slat. The match burned itself out, and they lit another, then another. Minutes stretched to a quarter-hour, then a half-hour, and the bullies became puzzled, giving each other the concerned looks of boys who had carried something too far and did not know where else to take it.
“Get off.”
The two boys turned to see 12 year-old Jimmy Shustak standing barefoot in his holed t-shirt and ripped underwear. He had been watching the whole thing. Rather, the whole thing had been keeping him from a night’s sleep.
“What’s it to you?” Kimmel snarled.
“Sleep.”
“So go sleep,” Hartman said.
“Youse’s taking too long with this crud,” replied Shustak. “And if you dumb bastards torch the kid, the screws’ll come barging in here and we’ll be up all night.”
“Who you callin’ bastards, you greaseball?”
Suddenly no longer weary, Jimmy took a step closer, his stubbyfingered hands balled up in tight, rock-hard, scarred fists.
“This one greaseball right here is callin’ you two bastards bastards,” he said matter-of-factly, a glint of malice in his dark eyes.
In fact, with the exception of Alan, whose father was dead and mother was locked away in a state mental asylum, “bastard” was less an insult than a description.
As for Alan, the knowledge of his mother in the hellish limbo of a nut house—her view of reality crushed by the unfortunate combination of a fragile psyche, cruel upbringing and relentless hopelessness-fueled both his rage and his obsession for self-control.
Kimmel and Hartmann were bullies, but they were mere cogs in a great social order of bullying that started with Headmaster Warden (who himself was harassed by ward masters and local bureaucrats, who inevitably had tormentors of their own) and went all the way down to young Alan Scott who, like the lowest order of simple life, could only hope for the victory of perseverance. Luckily for Alan, Jimmy Shustak was a cog above Kimmel and Hartmann in this great machine. And he, Kimmell, and Hartmann all shared with absolute certainty the knowledge that Jimmy could simultaneously beat both boys into a coma. This motivated them to do as he said, in spite of their posturing. The talk and name calling was face-saving that Jimmy allowed them in order to save time and energy. He enjoyed inflicting a good ass-whupping as much as the next kid, but it was late and he was losing valuable shuteye.
The boys got off the bench and stepped away, never taking their eyes off of Jimmy.
Shustak casually kicked open the lid, curious to see how the new kid fared. He had been watching Alan take his lickings from the first day, and had been impressed by the kid’s dignity. As a matter of fact, Alan Scott was rich with it. There was no love at Willoughby house, nor heat, nor privacy, nor compassion. There was little food, few blankets, and only traces of hope, which sadly was about as real as fool’s gold.
But in this nasty, brutish place, among adult and child, tormentor and victim, dignity was the ultimate commodity, a treasure as rare as sapphires. It was the only thing craved by all, and everyone worked to strip it from those few who had it.
Scott climbed out of the bin, his face wet and streaked black with coal suet and sweat, his chin covered in blood, the flesh of his lower lip cut and bleeding from his biting into it. He stared them all down-it wasn’t so much a look of withering defiance as the look of someone who had found his center. Now more than ever, young Alan knew who he was and of what he was capable.
The feeling of paralysis, the loss of control, the certainty of being burned, had terrified him. But unlike others who were released from the box after going through this time-honored, vicious ritual, Scott did not scamper away, whimpering. Nor did he force laughter and try to ingratiate himself, becoming “one of the boys.” He simply stepped out and walked to the bucket-deep concrete slop sink to wash the dirt and kerosene from his face.
Scott was always good at taking the pain. He’d learned early in life that suffering was one thing living offered in abundance. But he would be damned if he would show fear and lose control again.
The others watched him, their curiosity edging closer to grudging respect.
He pushed his way past the older boys to his bunk.
Jimmy couldn’t resist calling out to him. “Hey, kid... ”
Alan turned, his face expressionless.
“Why didn’t you cry uncle? Would’a saved us all some time.” Alan shrugged. “They were either gonna bum me or let me out sometime. Sayin’ uncle don’t change a thing.”
Jimmy nodded, impressed with the clarity. Alan was one of them now. He pitied the kid for it.
From then on, Alan had kept tight rein on his emotions, and his destiny. The other boys, especially Jimmy Shustak, recognized his restraint and rewarded it with hard-won respect, followed by deference. And as he grew to a young man in that miserable orphanage in a dying city, Scott came to understand what it took to be a leader of the unwanted.
Scott led the boys of Willoughby House by example of his fearlessness, taking on any and all challenges to his strength and dignity. Eventually his physical strength became self-evident so he began working on becoming good with words until he could convince anyone of anything.
He and Jimmy vowed to make better lives for themselves. They took on whatever menial jobs they could find to earn money to buy books and together learned to read and write. When they came of age they left the orphanage and shared an apartment, Jimmy working night watches at the railroad stockyard, then signing on for an apprenticeship with the
A line running up the northwest.
Later, he went to work for a construction company owned by a man named Albert Dekker.
Alan put himself through college, working nights as a warehouse janitor, the mindless rote work freeing his mind to spin new ideas and inspirations. He took his breaks sitting on an inverted bucket on the loading dock, reading "Milton, Thoreau, and the adventures of Hawthorne and Melville.
It was Jimmy who convinced Alan to study engineering. Based on what he saw in Dekker’s company, Jimmy convinced Alan that they could make a fortune building bridges for the railroads. He and Alan would go into business together, becoming masters of their own destinies.
But there was more to it than that-Jimmy had an angle to play. He had seen that Dekker’s company, with its monopoly on railroad contracts, had become lazy, sloppy, and slow. They could beat Dekker at his own game. It was the opportunity they had been looking for their entire lives. The Big Break.
No sooner had Alan graduated then Jimmy had quit his job and together they started their own construction company. Jimmy’s older brother Paul staked them with a little cash, and the two friends took on every crappy contract for the railroads that they could, slowly building their crew and equipment. Alan created ingenious new bridge designs, taking on risky jobs and gambling that his crew could pull off the work. His devil-may-care attitude won him bigger contracts and employees eager to follow his lead. But above all, Jimmy and Alan brought discipline to each job, bringing the work in on time and under budget.
Jimmy and Alan made it a point to hire men that Dekker would not-outsiders and immigrants that did not have the comforts and security of family, men who, though they couldn’t read or write English, were smart, strong and motivated.
With this crew of outsiders, Jimmy and Alan steered their company with a purpose, just as they had steered their lives. They specialized in building bridges all over the world, in places where Dekker would not or could not afford to attempt, and they built as well a reputation for doing the impossible. To earn their reputation they had suffered, but this only made them stronger and forged their bond of loyalty. And always, no matter what the challenge or obstacle, Scott maintained his control.
Green Lantern - Sleepers Book 2 Page 3