The Safe
When the safe came in, Alva’s head was down sideways on his desk. He heard the junkyard’s box-bed truck grind through the main gate, so he got up and stepped out of the office door, giving a hand signal for the driver to accelerate so he could make it onto the scale through the slurry of mud, battery acid, cinders, burned insulation, asbestos, and grease. The tires pinwheeled in the olive-colored slop, and the truck waddled into place, dripping and sizzling. Alva noted the weight, and the crane operator swung an electromagnet over the truck bed to pick up clumps of cast-iron fragments, dropping them in a pile next to the yard’s wracked fence. Alva checked an invoice and saw that this was another load from the demolished sewing-machine factory, tons of rusted-together treadles, fancy flywheels, ornate stands. The magnet crane finished its work in twenty minutes, and Alva, who owned the junkyard, would have returned to his nap, but he noticed that the truck was still squatting low. He watched the crane operator disconnect the magnet and attach a hook to the end of the cable. Little Dickie, the welder, got up into the truck’s box to attach the cable to something. At his signal, the cable jerked taut, and the whole truck rose on its springs. An antique office safe, at least eight feet high and six feet wide, swung up into the sooty air.
The rambling brick sewing-machine factory had been out of business for sixty years, its huge inventory of parts and partially assembled machines rusting in heaps even after most of the buildings were taken over in the late forties by a tire-manufacturing plant. The new management jammed all the left-behind equipment into the owl-haunted foundry building and went about their business until their tire process became obsolete in the 1970s. A millworks took over the hulking factory but soon failed and was replaced by a warehousing firm, which gradually vacated the crumbling plant as roofs fell in and smokestacks tumbled across the storage lot, startling only pigeons and rats. Finally, a chicken processor bought the site, and the owners decided to tear the factory down as quickly as possible and sell all the scrap metal to Alva. Hills of sewing-machine components, and the machinery that made them, had been coming in for two weeks. The truckload containing the safe was the last shipment.
Discarded safes showed up at the junkyard a few times a year, but this one was older and larger than most, a symbol of a substantial business. He admired the safe’s thick arched legs that showed off rusty iron lilies, and he noted the precisely cast rope design rising along the borders of the double doors. He was a man who enjoyed the artful details of things, even of objects he shipped daily to the smelter. The crane operator pulled a lever in his cab and the safe came down, slowly falling back and flattening a Chambers range. Alva walked over as Little Dickie climbed out of the truck’s box. The crane engine died, and they stood there listening to the stressed porcelain popping off the range’s shell.
Alva climbed up on the safe and tried the dial, which was pitted and green, and it rotated with a gritty resistance. The safe looked as though it had been dug up, and it was slimed with a rusty wet clay. Alva hollered to the driver, “This thing hasn’t been opened. Who told you to bring it on?”
The driver had only his right eye, so he turned his head severely in the truck window. “The head construction foreman hisself.”
Alva stepped back to the ground and bobbed his boot toes in the mud a few times. “Hell, this thing might be full of diamonds.”
The driver shook his head. “It was facedown in a pile with the rest of the junk. Foreman said you bought every piece of iron out there including this thing.”
“Well, I better call him.”
“It was left behind in a sewing-machine factory,” the driver hollered. “What could be in it?”
Alva bit into his cheek. “That foreman didn’t want to know?”
“He had thirty cement trucks lined up and ready to pour around where the safe was. Soon’s I loaded up, he run me off.”
“All right, then. Go on to the transmission shop.” The truck slithered away toward Perdue Street, and Alva turned to the burner. “Open it up.”
Little Dickie grabbed a cutting torch off a nearby tank dolly then stopped to give the safe a look. “I don’t think so.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Remember Larry Bourgeois?”
“Oh.” Larry had worked for the yard when Alva’s father ran it. An old riveted safe came in one day, and when Larry started to cut it apart with a torch, it blew up. Larry and the door came down two blocks away. The safe had belonged to a construction firm and held a box of dynamite. “Ain’t you curious?” Alva said.
Little Dickie pressed the lever on his torch and let out a derisive spit of oxygen. “I’m curious about what’s on TV tonight. I’m curious about what Sandra’s gonna make for my supper.”
Alva walked to his office, a cinder-block cube, and pulled open its leprous steel door. The room’s interior walls were lined with possibly functioning automobile starters, tractor transmissions, boiler valves, chain saws, bumper jacks, and one twin-floppy computer. Though he made good money, Alva was not particularly proud of his business. He had started out working part-time for his father, intending to move on after high school and live in New Orleans—maybe take drafting or even art lessons, since he loved to draw things—but somehow his hours had gotten longer, and then his father passed away, leaving him with a business that nobody but Alva knew how to run. He looked out his dusty window at the taken-apart world of his scrapyard, a place where the creative process was reversed and the burnt-umber insides of everything were spilled across his property.
His eyes fell on the safe. He thought about how his yard workers had no curiosity, no imagination, how too many people glanced at the surface of things and ignored what was inside. For the rest of the afternoon he tallied the scale sheets and figured his little payroll, but between tasks he daydreamed about the contents of the safe, wondered how many times in its life it had been opened and shut. He closed his eyes and pictured himself inside, a witness to the light-flashed face of the employee who opened the doors each day to retrieve patent drawings, payroll, gold leaf for the fancy embellishments on the machines’ black-lacquered bodies.
That night at supper he sat with his wife, Donna, and their two daughters, Renée and Carrie. He told them about the safe, and Renée, a somber child of eight with a narrow head and watery eyes, stopped eating for a moment and said, “Maybe a ghost is inside.”
Alva frowned, but was delighted by the way she was thinking. “Couldn’t a ghost get out by just passing through the metal?”
Renée stabbed at her potato salad. “At school Sister Finnbarr says our souls can’t get out of our bodies.”
Her sister gave her a sharp look. “Oh, be quiet.” Carrie was eleven, already pretty, and smarter than all of them. Alva dreaded her growing up and leaving them behind like bits of her broken shell. “A ghost isn’t a soul.”
Alva avoided her eyes. “How do you know?”
Carrie made a little huffing noise against the roof of her mouth. “A soul is either inside you or it’s in heaven or hell. It sure isn’t hiding in some rusty safe sitting in a Louisiana junkyard.”
“Then what’s a ghost?” Alva asked.
Renée put up her hands, palms forward alongside her pale face, and began to sway from side to side while speaking in a wavering voice. “It’s this smoky thing that drifts around and talks.”
“You’re crazy,” her sister told her. “A ghost is something made up, like in comics or movies.” The girls began to bicker in rising complaints until their mother stopped them.
Donna put a hand on her husband’s arm. “When you gonna open that thing up? It might have some money in it.”
Alva noticed for the first time since he could remember that her brown eyes were bright, glistening under her sandy bangs. “There’s probably nothing in it but drawings of sewing machines and stuff like that.”
“Or the last payroll.”
“Don’t count on it.” Over the years he’d noticed that his wife’s interest in him
depended on how much money he brought home. Three years before, when the margin on copper was high, she was his best friend. Last year she’d cooled off a bit. “But there might be something interesting.”
She took a swallow of iced tea and banged the glass down. “What’s more interesting than money?”
He glanced at her, wondering if she had finally defined herself. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll find out.” He looked into the darkening backyard, where his yellow dog, Claude, sat placidly with a forepaw planted on the back of a large toad. He was an older dog, vaguely like a golden retriever, but really just a yellow dog, which is what happens when every breed on earth is mixed up in the course of a hundred years. The animal had been a gift from Alva’s brother, who worked for a federal agency. Claude had been trained to find bodies but was never a stellar performer, so he’d been retrained to find drugs at airports, a task at which he excelled only too well. If he found marijuana, he tried to eat it all in one gulp.
The next morning, a yard crew was busy crushing all the old washing machines and dryers that had come in from the burned-out coin laundry at the edge of town. Snyder Problem, a big ex-preacher whose job it was to stand at an anvil and break bronze and copper out of the ferrous scrap, was cracking open rheostats with a maul when Alva walked by. Snyder was an old man, but his arms were still round and firm. The sleeves had been cut off his blue work shirt at the shoulders, and his biceps jumped each time the hammer fell against the anvil. It was a hot day, and sweat rolled off his bald head in beads. Alva couldn’t imagine Snyder in a shiny suit addressing his congregation back in the days before his church burned down. “Seal welds,” Snyder announced in his big preacher voice.
Alva stopped and looked over his shoulder. “What?”
“Me and Little Dickie was lookin’ over that safe, and ever’ door seam and joint on it’s welded with thin seal welds. Looks like Heliarc work, too, so that dates it.”
“How’s that?” Alva walked over and saw that the mud had dried on the doors and someone had swept it off with a broom.
“Heliarc wasn’t used till the early forties.” Snyder picked up a brass bibcock and broke the iron handle off with a sparking blow of his hammer. “Somebody welded it up about when the sewing folks went out of business. That big ol’ thing’s tight as a sardine can.”
“What for, do you think?”
Snyder shook his head slowly and looked Alva in the eye. “It’s a mystery, and I don’t know if you want to solve it or not.” He spat a dart in the safe’s direction. “Some men would just get a backhoe and bury the thing.”
“It’s a safe, not a coffin.”
Snyder picked a brass doorknob off the ground and shook the iron shaft out of it. “I hope it’s a safe,” he said.
Alva took a step back. “You’re letting your imagination run away.”
“I thought that’s what an imagination was for. It didn’t run away, it’d just be like seeing.”
His boss looked at him a long moment. “I didn’t know you thought like that.”
Snyder waved his hammer at the safe. “You got to use your imagination. You can make stuff with it, like ideas nobody never had before.”
In the cluttered office, Little Dickie draped an arm around the water-cooler jug, holding a triangular paper cup in his free hand. Alva pointed at him. “Seal welds, huh? You decided to burn off the hinges yet?”
Little Dickie shook his head, his long bronze-colored hair shining like a schoolgirl’s. For a welder, he took uncommonly good care of it, always putting it in a ponytail when he was using a cutting torch. “Taking the hinges off won’t help open that type. Big iron rods come out the door and pass into the frame. It’s lying on its back, so it’d be easy to drill it and sniff at the hole to see if dynamite’s in this one. It has a pretty plain smell.”
Alva opened a rusty file cabinet’s bottom drawer and pulled out a 5⁄8-inch tungsten drill bit. “Here. Put a hole in it, then.”
By standing on the doors and taking turns with an enormous drill that smoked and spat sparks as it ran, Snyder and Little Dickie managed to drill two holes in the safe, one in each door. A quarter-inch-thick iron skin covered a deep layer of cement backed by another plate of steel. Dickie’s sinuses were smarting and running from all the dust raised by the drill, and he couldn’t smell a thing, so Snyder got down on all fours and put his big red nose close to one of the holes. Alva walked up behind him and watched.
Little Dickie coughed as he wound up the big drill’s cracked cord. He’d been a foreman at the wire plant, Alva recalled, but had been let go because he couldn’t do enough math. Though he’d signed on to work in the scrapyard temporarily, he’d been on the payroll for three years. Alva looked through the windows of a ’79 Volare that Dickie had been cutting up and thought about how his junkyard employees generally had fallen down the work ladder for one reason or another. The crane operator had been a trained mechanic, and even the old one-eyed truck driver had once made good money, back when he owned his own shrimp boat. Alva had always been what he was, going neither up nor down in fortune. He thought about how he was forty-five and envious of his workers because they at least had done something else in their lifetimes. He looked over at the wrecked and rusted chain-link fence forming the west corner of the yard, where a bramble mountain concealed a heap of uncrushed car bodies and refrigerator doors. The notion that he might straighten the place up a bit crossed his mind and kept on going.
Snyder Problem stood up and blew his nose into a red shop cloth. “Just smells like a hundred-year-old safe to me. Dynamite has a sweet smell, maybe with some rubbing alcohol mixed in.” He gave Little Dickie a look.
“I don’t know,” Little Dickie said. “I guess I could grind off those little seal welds to start with, if you want me to.”
Alva looked at his wristwatch. “Lunchtime. We’ll get on it when I come back at one.”
—
His house was just down the street, and for a change Donna had a hot lunch waiting for him. She walked over from the stove and stood by the table. “How about that old safe? You get it open yet? We rich?”
He swallowed and looked past her out into the yard, where Claude’s blond body mounded above a bed of asparagus fern. “If nothing’s in it, will you start serving me a cold sandwich again?”
Donna didn’t blink. “I might. It’s the old hunter-gatherer thing. You bring home an ox, we eat ox. You bring home a little squirrel, that means slim pickings around here.”
The analogy pleased him for some reason. “This is good stew.”
“Thanks.” She sat down across from him and began to eat. “You suspect I don’t think much of you?”
“No,” he lied, taking another bite. “But you know, I’m the junkman.”
“You’re Alva.” She pointed at him with her fork. “And you’re the one who decided you’re the junkman.”
He thought about what she might mean. “You’re saying I could be something else?”
She began wiping her plate with a pinch of white bread. “Only you can decide what you want to be.”
“The junk business is all right, I guess, though sometimes I feel like I’m going about it wrong.”
Looking out the window, she said, “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Be like Claude and take a nap.”
When he finished eating, Alva stood up. “Where’s his leash?”
“Hanging on the coat hook by the door. Why?”
“I’m going to take him down to the yard.”
“What on earth for?” Donna put down her fork, alarmed. “You’ll drop something on him.”
“Naw. I just need his nose for a minute.”
—
Snyder and Little Dickie were already back at work when Alva walked through the big yard gate pulled along by Claude, who was panting, his long pink tongue dripping beads on the dirt.
“Hey, boy,” Snyder said, holding out a blackened hand. Claude put his nose in Snyder’s palm, wondering at the paint, silicon, putty, zinc,
cupric oxide, lime scale, and graphite he smelled there.
“I figured I’d let him get a sniff of the safe,” Alva said. “See if he gives a reaction.”
Little Dickie looked doubtfully at the dog. Claude sat and returned his steady gaze. “That the dog trained for dead bodies and dope?”
“Sort of.”
Little Dickie extended his arm in a sweeping motion. “Well, be my guest.”
Alva pulled the dog over to the safe and grabbed his collar, bringing his nose close to the door. At first Claude seemed uninterested, but then he put one nostril to a drilled hole and sniffed in short intakes as if pumping his head full of air. He snuffed loudly, blew his nose free of scent, then smelled again, putting his forepaws on either side of the hole. Drawing back, he cocked his head sideways, rolled his ears forward, then raised his snout to the gray sky, howling a long, sorrowful note that flew over the fence and haunted the whole neighborhood.
Little Dickie took a step backward into a puddle of dark fluid leaking from a refrigerator compressor. “Damn. That yell could peel paint off a porch.” Claude howled again and began scratching at the safe’s door, drawing scent from one hole and then the other. Alva had never seen the dog express anything close to excitement, and for the past few years had considered him to be little more than a slow-moving lawn ornament. He was the kind of dog that didn’t do tricks, didn’t ask to be scratched or to be let in or out. He was a drifter dog, a brassy apparition noticed only when he was on the sofa or blocking the walkway to the mailbox. But now he was pulling the leash like a caught fish, dancing on the rusty safe like someone convinced a relative was locked inside. He made so much noise and got so upset that Alva towed him over to the office and shut him in.
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