As a Thief in the Night

by Chuck Crabbe

  "Where do you think you're going, Yvonne?" Nick asked, knocking the butt away.

  "Whatcha mean? Home."

  "But you're on our shift."

  "Shift's over."

  Nick looked at his watch. "We've still got six hours."

  "Not me. Maybe you do, company man. Ha, ha!"

  "You won't catch hell?" Ezra asked.

  "Ah! Come on now," the old man waved him off.

  "Why did they send us out?"

  "You never heard then?"

  "No."

  "One of the cylinder blocks came out gold!"

  "Bullshit!" Ezra said.

  "Saw it myself. It's a miracle!"

  "How many drinks did you have before work this morning Yvonne?" Nick asked.

  "Ha, ha! Maybe that's it after all. But to hell with all this, I'm goin' home to my wife." He pulled away fast.

  "Crazy old fucker," Nick said, and spit a mouthful of water onto the hot sidewalk.

  "But I like him just the same," said Ezra.

  Nick spewed out another stream of water, trying to better the distance of his last one. They were quiet for a moment and looked back to see if any of the other men were headed back to work. A row of them sat in the shade that the west wall provided, others sat at picnic tables on the grass and smoked. "I've got to stop spending money," Nick broke in as if he were giving voice to what he'd been thinking. "The cash here is great, but I've been going through it faster than ever." He stopped to take another drink. "How much have you saved for school, Ez?"

  "Fifteen hundred."

  "That's pretty good. How much do you need?"

  "Tuition is twenty-eight hundred for both semesters." Ezra paused and looked across the street. "But it doesn't matter anyway."

  "Yeah, I suppose you'll need loans no matter what."

  "I'm not taking any loans."

  "Then how will you swing it?"

  "I'm not going to university, Nick."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "I've decided not to go to Laurier."

  "But that's what you've been planning for. I thought you wanted to become a writer."

  "I don't think they can teach me to write in school."

  "So who can?"

  "At the beginning of September I'm going to take the money I've saved and buy a car."

  "For what?"

  "I'm going to drive out to Northern California."

  "What are you going to do out there?"

  "Take a job at one of the vineyards, study tragedy, camp at Big Sur."

  "Tragedy?" Nick asked, as if it didn't belong with the other two.

  "Yeah. I want to read all the great tragedies..." He paused. "I have a suspicion about them."

  "What's that?"

  "That they're not really tragic."

  "Ez, I got news for you. Clawing out your own eyes and wandering around blind and tortured is tragic. What else could it be?"

  "A gateway into the mystery."

  "I'm your best friend, Ezra, and I'm with you no matter what, but I've got to tell you that from where I'm sitting this all sounds pretty messed up. I mean, what about another school? I heard Barry Towfolow is going to play at Western."

  "Fuck Western."

  "But what about football? Haven't you already committed to the coach at Laurier? They're expecting you to be there on the first day of camp. And what are you going to say to your aunt and uncle?"

  "Football is always going to be there."

  "You made a commitment to those people though."

  "Maybe duty is the most dangerous of our temptations."

  "Jesus, are you sure all this is really you, Ezra?"

  "No, but I'm going to find out. And I'll be finding out for myself, on my own terms."

  Distant voices drew their attention. The men were heading back into the foundry. Ezra and Nick hopped off the wall and started walking back towards the factory doors together. "Don't get me wrong," Ezra said after it had been quiet for a minute, "I might still come back and be an athlete."

  "When?

  "When my philosophy has become athletic."

  "Athletic?"

  "A philosophy of the body."

  No one ever found out if the base metal inside the foundry had in fact turned to gold. For some it was an impossibility, a magician's joke. However, one young man, and a few of the others, perhaps those men who had once been solitary children, worked on one long grueling day after another with the unspoken hope that the miracle might be repeated in their presence. They believed in a day unlike all others, a day when the common mould the world tries so hard to bind us with, and within which we imprison ourselves, would be broken with the hammer of truth reborn, when a new song could be sung from an unchained heart. If something captures the imagination it is truth.

  As above so below. As within so without.