Tommy

by William Illsey Atkinson

  To the east there’s a widow with a grown daughter. She too is a fervent gardener, and a strait ball-keeper, and a sly peeper through hedges. I fought for these people too, Tommy thinks. God help me.

  Worst of all is Major Miles up the street. He’s pure Colonel Blimp — ramrod posture, staccato speech, grey hair, tobacco-brown moustache. Knows the Bolsheviks will triumph if his vigilance falters. Doesn’t smile at anyone, even his grandchildren. Barks at Tommy’s children. Barks at his wife.

  Barks at Tommy. It’s spring, and Tommy’s pruning the big russet in his front yard. And here comes the major.

  What are you doing! he yaps, as to a green recruit. Don’t you know what day it is!

  It’s Easter, Tommy says mildly, still pruning.

  Then get out of that tree at once! roars the major. Get down and go to church, you young idiot! That’s where you should be! Not strutting about up there!

  Tommy does stop pruning at that point. He looks down at the major, who’s in his usual tweed jacket and regimental tie and looks like Mauna Kea about to erupt. Tommy stares until the major whirls and marches away. Then he resumes pruning.

  Why didn’t you tell him you’d been to early service? Bet says at lunchtime. You were at church when the old fool was still soaking his teeth.

  It’s none of his business, Tommy says. I don’t have to justify myself.

  Tommy gets his revenge six weeks later. It’s the May long weekend and the major’s run his standard up the flagpole. Not the national flag but the symbol of the mother country, the dear old Union Jack. Tommy sees it rise, frowns, looks more closely. Finds his Navy binoculars. Smiles slowly. Picks up the phone.

  The major’s wife answers, a browbeaten bird-souled thing. May I speak to your husband? Tommy asks.

  The major comes on: Yes!

  Arch Atkinson here. Your neighbor down the street. Can I help?

  Help?

  Of course. I see you’re in trouble.

  What? Who’s in trouble?

  Why Major, you’re in trouble. How can I assist you?

  What in Christ’s creation do you mean, man? I’m not in trouble!

  Then why are you signaling that you are?

  You’d better tell me what you mean this instant.

  You mean you don’t know?

  Goddammit! You tell me —

  Your flag, Tommy says. It’s upside down. At sea that’s a universal distress signal. Is there a fire? Electrical trouble? Someone poisoned, perhaps?

  My flag?

  The flag on your pole, Major, says Tommy, speaking slowly and deliberately. The one you’ve just hoisted. It’s arse over teakettle. Better fix it before the fire trucks arrive.

  Tommy lowers the handset. He feels fine.

  He goes to church for the same reason he wears a hat, because that’s what middle-class men do, but he’s long abandoned formal belief. His creed is adamant, but it’s not Incarnation-Resurrection, or Salvation-By-Faith. Tommy believes in work, family, education, and an occasional sip of whiskey, and that belief has served him well.

  Still, he’s fond of St John’s Ancaster. It’s a small church in the English style, stained glass and iron-streaked stone and hammer beams hewn from old pine. It’s cold year round, ball-freezing in winter and welcome-cool in summer, and Tommy goes alone. Having risen early all his life, he likes the first service of the day: it has no hymn or sermon and distils religion down to a thousand words. Tommy spends a sweet half-hour listening to Tudor English, the loveliest tongue on Earth. It fills and nourishes him like a hearty meal.

  He hears it on other days, too, as death convenes the old. Eugene Victor Illsey, always so vigorous, always so easy to hate, suffers a series of mini-strokes that flake away his mind. At the same time, the widow to the east develops dementia. Bit by bit both fade to black.

  Strangely, as both die, both improve. The purse-mouthed crone grows as sweet as sugar. She beams at Billy and once, shyly, strokes his cheek as he walks past on his way to school. Tommy softens when he sees the sky-deep love that shines from her eyes. Of course, it helps that she no longer talks. Neither does Eugene Victor Illsey, who similarly mellows in his final months.

  Why did we ever get minds? Tommy wonders on an evening walk. They haven’t done much for us. Medicine and art, sure. But also five-inch shells and atom bombs and Myrts that blast a carrier elevator six hundred feet into the air. Maybe heaven’s just a place where everyone stops thinking.

  Tommy’s still paid a pittance, but now his bosses do what kings have always done, and grant him titles. He becomes chief engineer and gets his own office. Its walls are green, the hue of tubercular phlegm. Gang Green, Jim calls it. Tommy asks the partners to paint it, but they see no need — honors are free, paint is not. Tommy buys his own paint and spends a weekend redecorating. Other employees see the new décor and are annoyed at what they see as special treatment. They complain to the partners. The partners’ response is no response; they can’t admit they’ve compelled their newly minted chief engineer to make his own improvements. The office concludes that Tommy is valued more than they are. Tommy discovers this one morning when nobody but Jim will talk to him.

  Tommy walks through the senior partner’s reception area, brushes by a bleating receptionist, and opens the senior partner’s door. The senior partner sits at his desk playing solitaire.

  You could have told the truth, Tommy says.

  About what, says the senior partner, turning over an ace.

  About my office. You could have told them you were too tight to fix it up for me and I had to pay for it myself. That is the truth, isn’t it?

  The senior partner puts red two on black three, says nothing.

  There is one further thing you can do for me, Tommy says into the silence. The senior partner glances up.

  You can shove your company up your ass, says Tommy. Sideways would be nice.

  The next two years are lean. Tommy builds a drafting table and stops paying his boys an allowance. He calls everyone he can think of and tells them he’s out on his own. You can find another job, Bet tells him, and Tommy shakes his head.

  From now on, he says, the only boss I trust will be myself.

  After six months living on savings, he gets his first job. It’s a small thing, reviewing existing drawings and affixing his engineer’s stamp. But it’s a thousand bucks — this when milk is a dime a quart and gasoline two bits a gallon — and Tommy stands by the front-door mail slot looking at his check.

  There’s more where that came from, Bet says, hugging him from behind.

  Young Tom’s in university. Impossible, but there it is: out of senior year and into engineering. It seems last week that a son was born and war called a new father away. Now the old man’s fifty-one and young Tom’s eighteen. Tommy’s so proud of his boy that he almost tells him.

  Billy — just Bill now — is a high-school junior with a driver’s license. Bet’s in menopause. And Tommy has brand-new quarters in a downtown office tower.

  Well! Not downtown. The north end, near the harbor. And new only for him. The building’s all of seven stories and its windows leak, but Tommy’s delighted with it. Gold leaf on the door says A.H. Atkinson & Associates. No associates yet, but Tommy knows they’ll come.

  Next door is Eastern Construction, which gives him the occasional job. Jerry Bonito, its president, is an ex-pat like Tommy. Unlike Tommy, he drives a flashy car and has a year-round tan. His partner is Patrick Reilly, a sardonic man who speaks with a lilt.

  There are times when Tommy envies Jerry Bonito. Jerry is promiscuous, boastful, idle, a beautifully coiffed, gorgeously dressed peacock who surfs through life on a wave of bullshit. He has charm to burn but no professional skills that Tommy can see. Yet, though Jerry’s a lady-killing, country-clubbing boozer, hard-headed allocation committees are putty in his paws. The man breaks contracts, misses dea
dlines, makes technical cockups, but can walk into a room full of people determined to jail or shoot him and two hours later walk out with a vote of thanks.

  Jerry’s real talents are smooth-talking and manipulating people. He remembers clients’ anniversaries when his clients forget them, sends them Chivas Regal at Christmas, sets them up with high-class whores whose mouths stay open in hotel rooms and stay shut afterward. Tommy compares Jerry with Feathers and feels ill. Feathers was the real deal, humor and brains and style and honesty and élan. Jerry’s a parody, a cardboard cutout of a man, and Tommy is constantly dumbfounded by his success. Feathers crystallized the freedom of the unexpected, a world of infinite possibility. Hamilton’s captains of industry must be famished for that. They settle for Jerry Bonito, who gives them the despairing grimace of the clown.

  Tommy’s happy because he’s busy. Work has gone from a trickle to a flood and become more challenging. Now he does greenfield projects that in eighteen months transform a few acres of scrubland into three-shift mills. His mba is proving useful. But it’s the work beyond the paid work, the love-labor with no billable hours, that really pumps him. Tommy’s returned to an idea he had ten years ago: steel formwork that’s designed to be left in place.

  The project has pushed him into an alliance with a local university. Tommy reveres education: it’s humanity’s glory, and it got him off the farm. But the closer he gets to the institutions at education’s apex, the more they seem like wrangling stews of self-obsessed, reality-challenged eggheads. A university president in California nailed it: a university is a set of warring faculties loosely united by a common parking problem.

  One man he does trust is an engineering professor named Lyle Nilson. His students call him Vile Lyle, which if Tommy dwelt on it would seem unsettling. His favorite profs have always been kind as well as brilliant. But Lyle seems okay. True, he’s a Brit and a snob, with a handshake so limp it’s as if he can’t wait to wash his hands after touching you. But he’s a neighbor, his daughters are Bill’s schoolmates, his wife and Bet are in a church group, and he’s offered to champion Tommy’s idea from first test to commercial product.

  Tommy’s worked hard on his brainstorm. He sees that while it would make good walls, it would make even better floors. In 1963, the standard floor is structurally inefficient, weak yet heavy. If it’s steel, it has to be absurdly thick to support the concrete that’s poured on top of it to deaden sound. If it’s pure concrete it must be even thicker, as well as being laced with steel reinforcement bars. And of course all that wooden formwork is costly to buy, ship, set up, strip, and lug away. Why not start with a light steel deck and use its top slab for more than noise control? Make the slab literally pull its weight? The deck would be so flimsy you’d have to support it while the slab cured, but at frequent points you’d weld connectors that the liquid concrete would engulf and set around. When the slab cured, it wouldn’t be a thick steel floor iced by dead-load concrete. Nor would it be a concrete floor shot through with tons of rebar. It would be stiff and thin, with far less concrete and steel than any existing design. A composite floor.

  Great idea. But ideas gobble time, sweat, and cash. Technology is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward. Tommy’s hours pile up — a thousand, fifteen hundred, totally unpaid. He himself finances the mockup tests in Vile Lyle’s structures lab. The first design looks promising, but fails short of the strength that Tommy wants. Tommy heads back to the board to change truss spacings and connector shapes.

  A month after the first test, Tommy wakes at three a.m. with the perfect connector as plain to him as daylight. It’s a mushroom — a thin stem supporting a bulbous tip. This will lock together slab and steel, supporting both the floor’s own weight and whatever rests on it. A floor made to the new design fails at ninety-six percent precalculated capacity. Tommy’s almost there.

  Things are happening beyond Vile Lyle’s structures lab as well. The university is growing. Welding arcs flare and power shovels roar as a sleepy Baptist seminary wakes up and tilts at greatness. Yet there’s irony in this flurry of construction. It was Tommy’s father-in-law who pumped hands, twisted arms, and called in a lifetime’s worth of favors to raise the millions of dollars required. Yet the university names its new campus not for Eugene Victor Illsey but some drooling emeritus dean. Tommy never liked Eugene Victor, but nobody deserves treatment like that. Sometimes the university seems like a confederacy of shits.

  One night, Bill says, My friends and I want to visit Jamie Enright on spring break. He’s asked us down. We could take the train.

  Tommy lowers his paper. What college is he attending?

  UMich at Ann Arbor. Where you were.

  Tommy’s mind soars back twenty years. Bill’s saying something.

  Dad?

  Fine, it’s a fine idea. When would you go?

  March twentieth, for the weekend. Could you give me some addresses? People you knew when you taught there? I’d be your ambassador. Give them your regards.

  Tommy looks at his son. His chest feels warm. I’ll write you out a list, he says.

  He drops Bill and his friends at the valley station on a bright spring day. They’re pushy and lighthearted and the whole boisterous pack of them makes Tommy smile. Happy childhood, what a strange conception. Bill shakes his hand as the train arrives. Tommy blinks. He wants to hug his boy so much his arms hurt, but it might embarrass Bill. The boys surge aboard, the locomotive growls, and they’re away. Tommy’s left standing, watching a new generation voyage into his past.

  Tommy’s doing calcs with his slide rule when Pat Reilly walks into his office with a gravedigger’s face. Drops an academic journal on Tommy’s desk.

  Glad you’re sitting down, he says. Page forty-one. He leaves.

  Tommy cracks the journal, finds the page. Refereed article by Lyle J. Nilson, B.Eng. (Oxon.), M.Eng., Assistant Professor, Faculty of Engineering, McAllister University, Hamilton, Ontario. Ultra-efficient Decks Using Mechanical-Structural Linkages Between Steel and Concrete Components.

  And there it is: everything Tommy’s worked on for the last three years, presented without one reference, citation, or acknowledgement to Tommy or the horse he rode on. Presented strictly as Lyle Nilson’s intellectual property.

  As his invention.

  Tommy resists an urge to punch the wall. He picks up the phone.

  Professor Nilson, please . . . Lyle! Archie here. Pat Reilly just showed me your latest article. I am, to put it mildly, disappointed. No, it wasn’t your idea, Lyle. It was mine from first to last. I employed you to test it. You work for me. Yet you have advertised everything here as yours. What? Not at all. I’ll see you in twenty minutes.

  Tommy stands, takes a deep breath, walks into Pat’s office.

  Some cunt, Pat says.

  You denigrate a fine and useful thing . . . You know what a friend once told me, Patrick? A university is a nest of scorpions.

  You should have listened to the fellow.

  Too late now. Tommy shrugs into his raincoat, mashes on his fedora.

  Off to see him?

  I am.

  In fit state to drive?

  No.

  And driving anyway, it seems.

  Yes.

  Good luck, Pat says.

  Never had it, Patrick. Never needed it.

  You misconstrue. Good luck to Himself against all odds. Don’t fillet him, lad.

  Lyle’s at his desk when Tommy arrives. He looks up, ingenuous and untroubled. Tommy tosses the journal on his desk.

  Explain, he says.

  Lyle blinks at him. I say, Atkinson. I don’t respond to orders, you know.

  You’ll respond to this one, Lyle. Or I’ll break your fucking nose.

  Lyle blinks at him. Beneath his blue irises a suspicion kindles that this situation may require more than a short chat with the dean.

  Well, really,
Archie! I mean, there’s nothing here to make one spit tacks. Just another dreary academic paper. Data, methodology, la de da. Reporting our findings.

  No, Lyle. Reporting my findings as yours.

  Lyle blinks. I did the tests.

  To my direction. On my designs. On my tab. I even designed your test protocols. You aren’t principal investigator here, Lyle. I am. This work is mine. Tommy stares at him unblinking.

  Lyle’s used to snubbing colleagues and bullying students. Now it dawns on him he’s mortally offended a conqueror of Imperial Japan. Lyle doesn’t start to perspire so much as he surges to a sweat bath in a tenth of a second. He tries to swallow.

  You will write a letter to this journal, Tommy says. At once, today. You will acknowledge me as sole inventor of this concept and state explicitly that I retained you to investigate it for me. You will conclude your formal statement by asserting that all intellectual property vested in this invention rests with me and has done so from the beginning. Do you understand?

  R-really, Archie. Seems rather superfluous . . .

  Do you understand.

  Lyle blinks. And if I ref-f-fuse?

  Tommy looks about him, finds a phone book. Tosses it on Lyle’s desk.

  Draft to me today, Lyle. Otherwise check out plastic surgeons.

  Did you not kill him, Pat Reilly says.

  Tommy shakes his head. I wanted to.

  What did you do, for Jesus’ sake?

  Nothing physical.

  But?

  I humiliated him.

  Not before a witness, surely.

  No humiliation if you don’t do that, Patrick.

  What witness then?

  The only one that counts. The man himself.

  Ah. That bad.

  To: Editor, Civil Engineering Letters

  Fr: Nilson, Lyle, B.Eng. (Oxon.), M.Eng. (Belfast)

  Assistant Professor, Faculty of Engineering