“Don’t hand me that. You wouldn’t trade her in for the old man’s Rolls and whatever goes with it.”
“Sure I would. Only, every time I ask him about it he tells me he can get more mileage out of that old heap than he could out of Shirley, and for less money, too. You want to goof off tonight? I can fix you up on the Centrale and have a couple of the guys cover up for you. I mean, with that bum hand and all.”
It was an astounding offer, and it was the first time I had heard him make it to anyone in the six years I had worked under him. I suspected he was feeling strong pangs of conscience at having sent me up on the drydock last night in the spirit of malice. If it had been just another assignment, all right. This way, if anything had happened—
I said: “You don’t have to fix me up. I can hold up my end,” and he was obviously pleased.
“All right, then you and Mac’ll start off by cutting the 181 loose. Tide’s full about four o’clock, so she’ll go into the water then. After that, you come over on the Centrale, but you can take your time about it.”
He gave me my gear and my empty lunchbox which he had stored in his locker overnight, and I put the lunchbox away and slowly got dressed for work. The effects of the shock were still on me, I felt that I was being held in a sort of fine emotional balance, and I didn’t want to do anything to joggle it. All I wanted to do was keep my thoughts moving straight ahead. I wanted them to move right down the middle of that long corridor which stretched from now to midnight, and which was filled only with the small details of my job.
I took the tools of my trade and walked out of the plate shop. I was the last one out, I left emptiness behind me and saw not much more than that before me. The yard was back to normal after its big night. The only car in view was the antique limousine with the wickerwork side panels parked outside the Administration Building, the uniformed chauffeur bending over its hood and polishing it with a rag. The only men in sight besides the chauffeur were a few down by the 181.
I walked the hard, gouged and rutted, pipe- and rail- and hose-bestrewn path to the 181. Andressen was there, talking to a couple of white-shirted yard executives. The last time I had seen him he had been stretched out full length in the boss’s chair, his eyes glassy, his speech maudlin, his regard for me overwhelming. Now as I walked past him his eyes flicked over me, flicked away, he went on talking, and sic transit. He had his job to do, and if he chose to wear the job the way a horse wears blinkers it was his affair.
MacPherson was waiting for me at the bow of the 181, poking a cleaning wire into the tips of an oxy-acetylene cutting torch. “You take that other one there,” he said. “It’s already cleaned out. Look how this thing is chewed up, will you? You’d think somebody was using it for a hammer.” He was a fussy man about his tools, MacPherson was; he had not only poked through the tips in my torch but had tried to polish up the worn brass of the handle.
I took the torch and went over to the tanks of oxygen and acetylene on the far side of the bow. The oxygen tank was tall and slender, the acetylene tank shorter and squatter. They stood against each other chained to a post in the ground. I checked the gauges of both tanks to make sure there was enough in them and saw that there was. I attached the hoses running from them to the cutting torch, and now there was nothing left to do for the time being but get into position and wait.
From the other side of the 181 could be heard the sounds of a sledge swinging against wood. Then the sounds stopped, and Big Noonan hove into view, the sledge-hammer over his shoulder. Part of the 181’s weight had been supported by four stout posts, two on each side, braced against her belly like flying buttresses. The posts had been made tight by wedges driven between their tops and the plates they supported. Once the wedges were knocked out and the posts thrown clear, the full weight of the boat would settle invisibly into the cradle. Big Noonan looked at me sardonically—it was the look of a man called upon unfairly to do two men’s work—and took his position by the forward post. He swung the sledge, swung it again, but the wedges were stubborn. Finally, with the third swing he loosened them, and a few more swings sent them flying. Now it was the post’s turn. The sledge made a pleasant sound smashing into it. Thunk—Thunk—Thunk—a slow jungle rhythm, the big drum being struck by an expert and angry hand.
Listening to it I became acutely aware that every sound around me beat with a rhythm, the whole thing was a fugue of sounds, marvelously dissimilar yet woven into a pattern keeping time with my heartbeat. The sledge thudding into the post, the lap of water at the foot of the ways, the cry of the gulls wheeling overhead, the bellow, bawl, toot, and snarl of big ships and little boats out on the bay, everything merged into an obligato to my own living sounds, my heartbeat and breathing. There was no discordance in anything I heard. I was the theme, everything else was an orchestration arranged to me.
Big Noonan let the head of the sledge fall to the ground and rested on the handle. He ran the back of his arm over his forehead. He gazed at the post without noticeable resentment or anger. “You miserable son of a bitch,” he said to it in a friendly way, and then bending forward he spat at it. The magic worked. He swung the sledge just once more, squarely into the blob of spittle there, and the post groaned, toppled, and bounded full-length on the ground, rolling away down the slope which held the ways above the tideline. “That’ll teach you,” Big Noonan said to the post and moved on to the next and last one.
When he had done with it, and it, too, had bounded away down the slope, he came strolling toward me casually swinging the sledge at stones on the ground, not angry any more, because there is no sense in being angry after a job is done. He was a very big man physically, and if he was fat around the belly—and, as MacPherson liked to tell him, between the ears—it did not conceal those big muscles or hamper their use. He stopped in front of me and showed his horse teeth in a grin. “The only good Injun is a dead Injun,” he said. “You can tell that to your pal for me next chance you get.”
“I’ll do that little thing.”
“You do it. Say, you better not stand there dreaming like that. Andy’s right around the corner. You want me to help pull that line?”
“I can handle it.”
“All right if you say so,” said Big Noonan and went his way.
Holding the torch in my bandaged hand I worked my way to the bow of the 181, drawing the hose lines along with my other hand. The 181 was now full on its cradle, and the cradle was held immovable to the ways by only two steel plates, one on each side of the bow. Cut them and down she would go, and MacPherson and I were there to do the cutting. It was a place of honor at the ceremonies which he had won through seniority and which I was being awarded because of my snapper’s guilty conscience. Fair enough.
The ways had been freshly greased and had a strong pungency to them, and I became aware of the smells along with the sounds. There was no end to the variety of smells in the air, now that I was away from the streets where the predominant stench was that of automobile exhaust. Way grease, burning coal, the leather welding jacket I wore, briny water, rotting timber, the fresh paint on the 181, cold metal which has a peculiarly flat smell like the taste of Mexican spices, all these, like the sounds, blended; all made a fitting and proper accompaniment to my own effluvium which was the unabashed reek of sweating human flesh.
I laid my torch on the plate I was going to cut and fixed my thoughts on sensations, nothing but sensations, holding them on the subject, not allowing them to veer away from it. I did that and waited, and then from the direction of the canal the night shift straggled my way so that I knew it was nearly time. It was their privilege to watch the launching, a privilege that no one had ever given them but which no one had ever denied them, and that is how privileges take root. They drifted over to the 181 in twos and threes, found themselves resting places on both sides of the bow and made themselves comfortable. The area in front of the bow was left clear. That was where majesty stood, and then majesty appeared through the door of the administration
building and tottered across his cluttered kingdom to the ways, one hand on the chauffeur’s supporting arm, the other wielding his walking stick like a pump handle, a small entourage of executives behind him, his body shrunken into his suit, the whole man like a pinch of ashes that the first winds of winter would blow away.
He took his position directly before the bow, twenty feet away from it, and he pushed aside the chauffeur’s arm and propped himself on the stick, hunched over it. There was a ladder against the 181 on MacPherson’s side, and after Andressen and a couple of executives appeared on the tug’s deck over my head I heard the ladder clatter to the ground. In the water at the foot of the ways the yard launch suddenly made its presence known, puttering away loudly, and that was the signal Andressen was waiting for. “Heat up,” he called.
My goggles were resting on my forehead. I pulled them over my eyes, and the world became a pastoral world, soothing to look at, everything in it a pleasant shade of green. I thrust my hands into my gloves, the bandage making it hard to get the left hand all the way in. The flint striker hung on a string from my belt. I held it to the tip of the torch, struck it while feeding gas into the tip, and the flame popped and came alive. I adjusted it, cleared it, and then squatted down over the steel plate. The path of my cut across the plate was marked by a thin straight line of black paint, and bisecting that path was a small black stroke to show the halfway point. I brought my flame down to the edge of the plate where the line started, and although I couldn’t see MacPherson I knew that at the same instant he was doing the same thing on the other side of the bow.
I held the flame rigid; it only wastes time moving it around for preheating. The trick is to build up one spot of heat which the oxygen can then slice through to start the cut. The edge of the plate became lighter, began to glow. There was no need to call out that I was ready; the old man who had lived seventy years of his life in this yard knew when I was ready.
“Cut!” he said, and his voice was as high and reedy as a note played on a broken whistle.
I squeezed the oxygen lever of the torch. The flame jetted out like a knife blade. It hissed at the glowing spot, a shower of sparks spurted up, and where they struck my face they felt like the most delicate of pinpricks. Then the flame sliced through the metal, molten steel poured from the cut, spattered on the ground, hissed briefly in the dampness there. I moved the torch slowly, steadily, smoothly. Once that plate had been sliced apart it was of no use to anyone, but this was the Voorhees yard, and before the plate was discarded Andressen would come by and glance at it. And if the cut was jagged and uneven he would run a contemptuous thumb over it. “Shoemaker’s work,” he would say, and whoever made that cut would hear about it at the lockers.
The flame moved toward the halfway mark, and the cut it left behind was clean and straight, minutely rippled as it should be, and perfectly centered along the line. And in my concentration the flame became a part of me, I became part of the flame, the clean, straight cut behind us was where we had been, the thin line ahead was where we must go, together moving on an inexorable track to a predestined place which had nothing to do with where I really was or what I was or what I was being paid to do. It was not the first time I had had this experience, and I was not alone in having it. It was the hypnosis which comes on a burner or welder when he is doing very close work and is straining for perfection at it.
The line of the cut touched the midway mark, passed over it. “Stop!” the old man called, breaking the spell, and when I released the oxygen handle the cut stopped where it was, dead on the mark. It was Last Chance, that mark. When you moved on from here you were in business, so that this was where the two burners, unseen by each other, could make sure they were synchronized perfectly. If one moved ahead of the other, and one plate was cut through before the other, there could be trouble.
“Cut!”
I had been keeping the spot at a glow. I squeezed the oxygen handle and the flame shot through the plate, picking up the cut exactly where I had left it. We said good-bye to Last Chance. We followed the middle of the track wherever it led, and there was nothing in the world except the flame which was I, and I who was the flame, and it was impossible to tell then which of us controlled the other. Then the cut we had left behind started to spread open. It spread wider and wider, opening out like a miniature fan, the handle of it under my flame. The flame hissed, there was nothing to cut into, and I looked up, pushing my goggles back on my forehead.
No one has ever seen a boat on the ways start its motion. It is only when it is moving that you know there is any motion. The bow of the 181 moved away from me. There had been darkness in its shadow; now there was blazing brightness. I blinked in the brightness, and the 181 receded down the ways. They were not long, and the tide was high, yet she looked far away. She struck the water with a splash, bounced playfully, rolled a little, the old man’s tin duck finally where she belonged. The cradle slipped forward from under her bow and floated clear, Andressen tossed the yard launch a line, the line tightened, and the 181, in tow, followed skittishly. She would be docked alongside the pier in the Basin, would be given her engines, her deckhouse, would be fitted out, and then go to work. She was made, like all of us, for work. Those ten seconds when she floated free of her cradle and her towing line were the whole playtime of her life.
I looked at her, and I knew why the old man felt about her as he did. He had made her, she was a lovely little thing, she would be all that was left of him when he was gone. She and her sisters, drab in gray or black, a red S on their stacks instead of the orange V they now wore, but all of them, no matter what their color or insignia, were the reason for his existence, the justification of it, and every man must have some justification for being alive and taking up precious space on the earth.
It suddenly struck me that I was on to something important here, something that made the thought of my calamitous romance dwindle a little in perspective. I seemed to be getting a look at past, present, and future all together by groping through this mystery of man’s individual mortality and collective immortality. For, after all, what are we but the ideas and artifacts we create, and why should I discount the value of my own small contribution? Because my family did? Because the world around them did?
Let’s grant that the big man in the cave a hundred thousand years ago was the man of ideas. He was the one who made known that pictures of the mastodon must be painted on the cave wall to propitiate the gods of the hunt and assure a kill. And he was undoubtedly the one who realized that a sharpened flint made the best way of doing the killing. Yet, someone had to paint the picture and sharpen the flint, and very soon all that remained of the idea man, the artist, and the artisan was the picture and the piece of flint, and we have been drawing our meaning from them ever since.
In a hundred thousand years from now when we have inhabited all the planets, they will send out archeological expeditions to visit the deserted, worn-out earth. And they, in their turn, will find artifacts—an ossified cabinet made by Samuel Fisher, the silver kneecap of a hero, two scraps of metal plate from a boat bonded by a smooth weld, the weld I had put there—and they will bring these objects back to their planets and put them in a museum with a card under them that says Specimens of work done by our primitive forebears, and what more could anyone ask from posterity?
If I told that to Joe Guion he would laugh. He would say, “Where do you get those ideas, pal?” and would talk about other things, the real things that happen today and happen close by. But I was with him once in his car on the way to Hogansburg to catch up on the hunting season, and I saw that a man does not always know his own feelings. There were six of us in the car—Guion, Pelleau, Abel, Voight, Lamoreux, and Egan, five of the tribe and the paleface they regularly bled at poker—and as we rode up the approach to the George Washington Bridge, that silver spider web flung across the Hudson to the Palisades and the road upstate, Voight, who sat next to me, looked up at its towers and said, “Pretty, ain’t it?”
&
nbsp; “Yeah,” said Joe. And then he said, “My old man’s got plenty of rivets in that baby,” saying it casually, but meaning that his old man was dead for many years now, but those rivets up there were still his, they were his memorial, they had his hammer blows marked on them, and you can drive right over that bridge and know nothing will come apart, pal, the job was done right and you can hum along and never give it a thought. Not a thought in the world.
So he felt the way I did about it, although he didn’t know that. And wherever I would go, whether to a back yard in City Island where they made light-gauge stuff for the family trade, or to the framework of a bridge or building, or to some shop which had not yet been invaded by the beltline or automation or pushbutton, I would meet others like him, hardbitten, ashamed to feel a pride in their work, but feeling it nevertheless. That was the fraternity I was in now, and would stay in. Nothing like Iobacchoi or the Alumni Club; but the work-shirt fraternity, grimy knuckles chapter. It was a sad fraternity in some ways, but it had its advantages. I never had to tell my boss I was working or act it out for him. He knew I was working because he saw the work, and as long as it didn’t sink or fall down or come apart, he knew I was doing a good job at it. Beyond that I owed him nothing. I could be myself—alone, apart, and wholly myself—which was something it was getting harder and harder to be nowadays.
So I squatted there in the ooze, the cutter still in my hand, trying to understand these complexities and contented enough with what I could understand. And squatting there I had the strange feeling that, simply as the maker of artifacts, I was one Daniel Egan and not the infinite images of him, swaggering and cringing, quarreling and pacifying, brave and cowardly, fugitive from the past, restless dweller in the present, dreamer of the future. At this time and this place, I thought unbelievingly, I have come home to myself. All along I had been keeping score on myself, marking everything in my life as a point won or a point lost, because that was how Ben Gennaro played the game. There is no coming home to yourself if you do it that way; not when you’re out playing the game to the bitter end. Now I was free from Ben and the game, and I could eat, drink, and rejoice in my labor. Could, as a free man, debate with my uncle, visit my sister, play poker with the tribe, and court the girls. What girls, remained to be seen. Somewhere, I knew, there was a woman with looks, intelligence, and sense of humor enough to fill the bill. That didn’t mean that I would find my way to her, not with my propensity for being sidetracked by beautiful schemers and dreamers, but whoever she was and wherever she was, she would do well to wait for me a little while. This time I might make the distance.
The Winter After This Summer Page 45