Snyder Problem rested a hip against his anvil. “Know what I think?”
“No, I don’t.”
“If you call the chief of police and tell him what that dog did, he might could find someone to unlock the safe. Save you the price of a locksmith.”
“What about the seal welds? A safecracker can’t get past those.”
“They’re thin,” Little Dickie said, reaching up to put a rubber band in his hair. “I can take them off with an angle grinder before the law gets here.”
Alva looked back toward the office and could hear Claude’s muffled barking. He didn’t like the idea of bringing police into the yard. He lived in secret envy of their clean uniforms, nickel-plated decorations, and shiny boots, the possibility that one of them might be promoted to something other than what they already were. Claude was now howling like a wolf.
“Tell the operator to get the crane and stand the thing up, then.”
—
The policeman who answered the phone wasn’t interested at first, but when Alva explained how the dog had been trained, the receiver went dead for a minute, and then the chief of police came on the line. “What brand of safe is it?”
“It says Sloss on the knob. Why?”
“I’ll tell that to Houston, the locksmith.”
“I thought he was dead. You think he can open it?”
“Is it a real old safe?”
“Yes.”
“That’s exactly his game.”
—
In an hour the chief’s cruiser pulled up, a freshly waxed black Crown Victoria with an elaborate gold-leaf badge on the door. Alva saw that even the tires were shiny, and he whistled. The chief was a short, balding man, and with him was Jack Houston, who slowly rose out of the passenger side and seemed so pained by a general arthritis that he stayed bent over, almost in a sitting position, as he walked around the hood.
“Hey, junkman,” he said.
“Mr. Houston.” Alva took his soft hand and then the chief’s big paw.
“You say your yellow dog alerted on a smell coming from a safe?” the chief asked.
“It’s unusual for him to get upset.”
The chief hitched up his gun belt. “I’ll listen to a dog’s opinion before that of most people I know.”
Jack Houston looked around and seemed surprised at the big safe sitting upright under the crane. “That thing ain’t gonna topple over on me, is it?”
“It’s stable where it is. The legs have sunk into the ground.”
“If it fell on me, that’d be a sad end,” he said, moving along in his creaky bowlegged stride. He pulled out a stethoscope from his baggy khakis. “You say it’s a Sloss?”
“Yessir.”
“Is it marked on the door or the dial?”
They had walked up to the safe by then, and Houston was looking right at the dial. “Well?”
“It’s on the knob there,” Alva said, noticing the locksmith’s milky eyes.
The old man touched the dial. “I need a spray can of brake-parts cleaner.”
“I got some spray lubricant.”
“Is it got the little plastic squirter?”
“Yessir.”
“That’ll have to do.” Houston twisted the combination dial back and forth, trying to work the grit from under it. When Alva returned with the spray, he used all of it blasting behind the dial, pitched the can, and plugged the stethoscope into his hairy ears. He worked the dial for five minutes or so, then his head came up sharply. “Damn it, turn off the crane engine.” He looked over at the office. “That air condition, too.” He bent again to his work and ten minutes later he pulled off his earpieces and stuffed the stethoscope into his pants pocket.
“Give up already?” the chief asked, his tongue fat in his cheek.
Houston chuckled. “Stethoscope’s mostly for show. It don’t tell much.” He cracked his knuckles, clapped his hands, and hung his arms at his sides. “Got to let the blood build up in my fingertips.”
Alva looked around at the other men, who were waiting patiently for something to happen, a treasure or a body to fall out onto the crushed battery casings and muck. For the moment at least, Alva envied the crippled and near blind Jack Houston. “How’d you learn to crack safes?”
“Pressure,” the old man said.
“What kind of pressure?”
“The pressure of eating a sandwich every day. Of paying the light bill.” He looked down, closed his eyes, and allowed only the very tips of his fingers to touch the dial. “One time a little four-year-old girl got into the Mosler safe down at the dime store, and damned if she didn’t pull the door shut on herself. If you don’t think that wasn’t a scene, with me on my knees in the storeroom in August heat and her mother crying down my back while I’m trying to feel my way through those tamper-proof Mosler tumblers. It took so long we all knew she was dead, a pretty little girl with black hair and violet eyes. The daddy comes in and starts punching me in the neck to hurry me up like I’m a balked mule, the Catholic priest is praying in Latin behind the safe, and here comes my young wife to stand to the side and eyeball me while I worked. The store manager offered me two hundred extra dollars to hurry me up, like a boxcar full of money would have done any good.” He pulled his hand away and brushed his fingertips with a pale thumb.
Little Dickie settled slowly into a squat next to him. “Well, what happened?”
“What happened? What you think happened? I got the door open and jerked her body out like a fish and gave her to Doc Prine. She was blue in the face and limp, but after a pretty scary while he brought her around. And when she opened her eyes, in that instant I went from the stupidest ox in town to some kind of saint. You never heard such noise in your life.”
“That was the Delarco girl?” Snyder Problem asked.
“It was. She grew up and is a school principal over in Pine Oil. Had four children and one of ’em’s named Houston.” He put his right hand on the dial and began to move it slowly.
“How long’s this gonna take?” Alva asked.
Houston closed his eyes. “Shut up and we’ll see. This big, nasty-looking baby was made in the 1800s. It’s simple as a box of Cracker Jacks. I’d as soon put my money in a cigar box behind the piano.”
The men walked over to the entrance gate and stood in a little circle in the shade of a hackberry growing through a rotted tractor tire. “You know,” the police chief began, casting a long look around the yard, “I had a complaint or two about the rats living in this place.”
Alva put a foot on an engine block. “You want me to talk to the rats about it?”
“No. But you could teach them to work a weed whacker.”
Snyder guffawed. “Chief, you could loan us a couple prisoners to pull up the brush.”
The men went back and forth like this, weaving a meaningless talk just to pass the time. They knew what they were doing, clouding their minds’ eyes to the fact of what might be in the safe—some sign of murder, a crumbling body falling to gray ash as the air reached it, or of thievery, a stingy payroll never given out to the perhaps starving laborers at the factory, or the stale air of nothingness, a seventy-year-old breath of fiscal shame. They talked and tried not to think for an hour, moving with the ball of shade thrown down by the hackberry tree. At last, Jack Houston’s voice came around a hill of tire rims: “I’ve got it.”
They all walked slowly, as if toward a grisly diagnosis. Houston beckoned them with his thin arms, then turned to the door and spun the wheel that drew out the deadbolts from the frame. “Someone will have to pull the right door open for me. If there’s another thin door inside, I’ll have to deal with that one a few minutes.”
Snyder stepped up and muscled open the squalling door, an antique and sweet air gliding past his face and on into the universe. He worked a lever and swung wide the other door. They saw no inner barrier, just a system of low metal shelves that stopped halfway up and then what appeared to be a large pile of sacks wedged into the remaining s
pace. Snyder seemed disappointed. He cocked his head and stepped back. “I guess the dog was smelling those hemp sacks.”
Little Dickie looked back at the office. “He got a snootful and thought he was in for a real good buzz. Thought it was hashish.”
Alva walked up and felt around in the sacks, which were whispery as dry hay. He turned to the men. “Something’s inside the pile.” He and Snyder pulled the sacks away, revealing a maple crate with dovetailed corners. The men slid it off its shelf and carried it into the office, where they placed it on the gray metal desk. The lid was nailed on, and Alva pried it up with a small crowbar. Inside the box he saw a layer of thick burgundy velvet cloth, which he unfolded as the men gathered around.
“Hey,” the chief said, “it’s made out of thick glass, whatever it is.”
Snyder picked up the desk lamp and held it high. “It’s a big glass dome with a handle on top. Kind of shaped like a suitcase. What’s that in it?”
“Let’s see.” Alva pulled up on the handle, which was textured and also glass, and he raised something—what, he couldn’t tell—out of the enveloping cloth. It was too close to see for a moment, heavy, two feet long and a foot wide. Snyder moved the crate to the floor with a wheeze, and Alva set the object on the desk where the crate had been. He stepped back.
The locksmith adjusted his glasses and leaned in. “Oh my gosh,” he said. “Will you look at this!”
The men bent down at the waist, hands on knees like schoolboys, and studied the oblong cut-glass dome etched broadside with the emblem of the Wiewasser Sewing Machine Company, a large shield with a waterfall in the middle surrounded by alternating stars and lightning bolts and fine, careful cross-hatching. Covering the surface beyond the emblem’s borders was a cloud of small hand-cut leaves. Female figures in Grecian dress walked up a mountain path through these leaves toward a tunnel of overhanging limbs. On the other side of the dome the etched waters of a rock-studded stream ran before a long temple whose fluted pillars framed the figures of goddesses, their hands held aloft to a white-gold sun. With a forefinger Alva traced the handle, a glass dolphin. On the two long sides, near the bottom, four damascened latch hooks swung on golden rivets in the glass. Inside the dome, the men began to comprehend an elegant sewing machine, antique, with a hand crank on the wheel. Alva slid the latches through their bright arcs, lifted off the dome, and placed it under his desk.
Little Dickie whistled. “Man, they coulda sewed a suit for the pope on this thing.”
The base of the machine was shaped like a fiddleback, made of intricately cast and clear-lacquered brass. The edges stepped down in a triple ogee to four detailed turtle feet, each cast toenail bearing an amber jewel the size of a small kernel of corn. The feet planted themselves on a dark subbase of burled rosewood, showing a carved border of miniature ocean surf. “I know they didn’t make them like this to sell,” Alva said.
“Not hardly.” The locksmith’s face brightened in the machine’s glow. “In the old days, there were international machinery expositions in the world’s largest cities. Factories would make up special exhibit versions of their products and go all out trying to best the other makers, no matter what it was they manufactured, even putting together fancy locomotives and giant mill engines, and steam gauges that looked like religious items off an altar. This thing’s got to be way over a hundred years old.”
“They used to crank them by hand?” Alva touched the flywheel’s bone-white handle. “This an early plastic?”
The locksmith’s eyes swam and focused. “Ivory. Do you see a pattern?”
Alva looked closer. “Little shallow fish scales. Helped you grab it, I guess.”
Snyder straightened up and laughed. “It’s a tree.”
“Damned if it ain’t,” Little Dickie said. The machine’s bright gildings placed star points in his eyes. “The whole body of the thing’s like a bent-over tree.”
Alva was gradually disheartened by the cleverness of the design. The main body of the machine was gold plated, indeed rising like a tree trunk and then leaning into an arch that ended in the machine’s head, a flattened mass of bunched metal leaves. The presser foot and needle protruded from the bottom. The bark pattern Alva knew well—water oak, like the big one in his yard—but this metal tree showed sinewy ridges of gold. Out of the machine’s leaf pattern stared the embedded garnet eyes of birds, squirrels, and toads hiding in the foliage. The casting and fine engraving showed the handiwork of what must have been the factory’s most talented worker. Near the flywheel was the maker badge, a repeat of the design on the glass cover, but here the stars were inlaid with small diamond-cut rubies, and the lightning bolts were coated with alternating layers of gold and silver. The flywheel itself was gold plated and scalloped along the rim, and on its face ran a serpentine row of hyacinth inlaid with ivory dyed apple green.
Alva felt belittled by the apparatus, as though his abilities were suddenly small and unrealized. He suspected the feeling would pass after a while, but really, who could make this? He hardly understood how to look at it. Every surface was a surprise of coherent innovation. The men pointed and stared for fifteen minutes before the police chief motioned toward a small wishing well protruding from the lower frame of the machine, exclaiming, “The little crank and shaft for the well bucket is the bobbin winder!”
It was a good while before anyone thought about value, which even to the scrap men seemed beside the point. Little Dickie pushed back his hair and straightened up. “What’s this thing worth?”
Snyder closed one eye. “Even if somebody just busted it up into scrap and jewelry, it’d bring a good bit.”
Alva put two fingers on the flywheel handle and turned it around through a cycle. The machine made no sound, and the motion was as smooth as water pouring from a teapot. “Mr. Houston, who could appraise something like this?”
“Oh, everybody knows everything nowadays because of that Internet. Just get your wife to take a picture and e-mail it around to some antique dealers. You’ll get a ballpark figure, anyway.”
—
At the end of the day, after everyone had left, Alva sat in his desk chair and toured the sewing machine, touching the inlaid slide plates, the platinum tension adjustment, and, on the fiddleback base, the mosaic peacock inlaid with bars of amethyst. He even examined the machine’s innards where the shuttle in the bottom was engraved with boat planks and false oarlocks. The machine’s glow was warming, clarifying, and when Alva looked away, he saw that his dingy office had changed. He could see it for what it was.
Nearly every day, some of the men would come in during break and look through the glass at the machine where it rested on a wide filing cabinet. His wife took photos and sent them to appraisers. She spent a great deal of time with the photography; in fact, she spent a whole afternoon shooting frame after frame, finally just sitting in front of the machine with her mouth open a little, as though exhausted by looking.
He walked up behind her and asked what she thought they ought to do with it.
“Well, I can’t sew any curtains with this thing, can I?” She closed up her camera case. “But I’d hate to see it go.”
Alva discovered that a small number of exhibition machines were in private collections, and those with semiprecious stones were worth upward of $10,000. One dealer responded with a letter, not just an e-mail, admitting that this was the finest he’d ever seen, and could bring up to $19,000 at auction. Alva’s wife said that it was his choice whether or not to sell, but his daughters wanted to bring it home and put it on the mantelpiece. What Alva decided to do, after the final appraisal came in, was to have a beefed-up security system installed in his office so he could keep the sewing machine there. If the appraisals were right, he couldn’t even buy an average sedan with the proceeds. And what would $19,000 buy him that wouldn’t turn to junk in ten years and wind up piled on the oily ground outside his office window?
He moved the dusty spare parts lining the room’s walls to a storage shed and
then painted the inside of the office antique white. He bought a new desk, chairs, and filing cabinets, as well as a rubber plant and brass lamps. Sometimes his daughters brought their friends to the yard to study the machine, and these were the first visits Renée and Carrie had ever made to their father’s place of business. His wife, who’d always liked to sew, bought an expensive Italian machine and began a small alterations business; in her spare time she embroidered elaborate nametags embedded in crests on his work shirts and even on Claude’s soggy collar. One day she followed him back to work from his lunch break and recorded his invoices for the week. Sitting in his padded chair, she looked over at the machine. “If you want, one of these days I could get some new velvet and make a dustcover for it with a little lifting strap on top. Run some embroidery around the bottom with gold thread.”
He stepped next to the desk, followed her line of sight, and rubbed his chin. “Yeah. That’ll work.”
She reached out, put a forefinger through one of his belt loops, and gave it a tug. “I won’t charge you hardly nothin’.”
—
Over the next several weeks he paid a crew to pull up all the brush and saplings from the hills of twisted metal that had lain unexplored since his father’s death, and he had the exposed junk crushed and shipped out in a railroad gondola. He graveled the yard and put up silvery new fencing.
Snyder would wipe his feet and come in during hot weather and linger at the water cooler next to the sewing machine, looking down on it where it rested in a cone of light cast by a brass floor lamp. When he was at his anvil, he seemed somber and bored, hammering away as if he was angry at steam gauges and toilet valves. Two months after they’d cracked the safe, Snyder began meeting with his old congregation from the low neighborhood behind the sawmill, and during August he leased the empty Woodmen of the World hall and reopened his church there. Alva was surprised when Snyder told him he was leaving, but not as surprised as when a month later Little Dickie departed for an exotic welding school in Dallas.
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