The Kingdom of Ohio

by Matthew Flaming

  Finally James Force nodded. “You might learn more here, anyway. Sit down.”

  Peter climbed onto the cot at one side of the room and his father sat beside him, opening the envelope that accompanied the package.

  He handed Peter the sheaf of pages. “Read this aloud.”

  Peter squinted at the smeared print. “The Edi-Edison evac-evacu—”

  “Evacuated vacuum bulb,” James Force finished, taking back the letter. “Study your reading. That’s important.”

  “Yes, sir.” Peter looked down at the floor. A moment later, though, his curiosity got the better of him. “Who’s Edison?”

  “A magician.”

  Peter gaped. “Really?”

  “Not really. An inventor, though. He made this.” James Force tapped the glass globe. “The first filament bulb was born the same year as you.”

  For the remainder of the morning and the afternoon that followed, Peter helped his father examine the contents of the box and listened while James Force read the pamphlet detailing the Edison bulb. Finally, as the sun was beginning to sink outside the attic windows, James Force repacked the bulb into the box and straightened.

  “Going up to the mill now.” He pulled on his jacket. “You carry that, follow along.”

  Peter lifted the box, staggering beneath its weight. “What’s at the mill?”

  “Where the electricity is.”

  They made their way to the outskirts of town, where a rough trail ran along the creek, into the hills and toward the mine. Above the path a canopy of evergreen branches extended out over the rushing water. The ground was uneven and several times Peter stumbled, nearly dropping his burden, his stomach clenching at the thought of the delicate glass object inside. If this worried James Force he gave no sign, walking steadily ahead of the boy.

  After a time they reached a place where the trail climbed a steep canyon, the creek racing downward in a series of flume-white waterfalls that turned the blades of a waterwheel attached to a small, asymmetrical mill house.

  A broad-shouldered man wearing a threadbare brown suit came out and shook hands with Peter’s father.

  “This is Mr. Kerry,” James Force told his son. “He runs the hydroelectric plant for the mine. He’s letting us use some of his current tonight.”

  Peter nodded silently, feeling overwhelmed by the barrage of new words and Mr. Kerry’s scrutiny.

  “Been wanting to see one of these bulbs in action myself, James.” Mr. Kerry clapped the elder Force on the shoulder. “Glad I can help.”

  Peter sat down on a log outside the mill house and watched as the two men set to work. They placed the ceramic bowl—the socket fixture, Peter remembered it was called—on a tree stump and ran a copper wire out from the dynamo attached to the waterwheel. Next came a period of adjusting connections, testing the line for voltage, readjusting, and technical discussion.

  At a certain point during this tinkering process Peter noticed that a small group of men were standing quietly behind him, watching the proceedings. From their dirty faces, helmets, and lunch pails, he recognized them as miners. A few minutes later another pair of men appeared, trudging toward town, and stopped along with the others to observe his father and Mr. Kerry work.

  Peter had started to fidget with the evening chill and thoughts of dinner when his father finally straightened and crossed toward him.

  “All ready.” James Force beckoned to his son. “Come see.”

  Peter climbed to his feet and followed his father over to the tree stump. With both hands, James Force lifted the glass globe and gently lowered it into the socket—and abruptly Peter found himself blinking against a wash of yellow light.

  Glancing around, he saw that an audience of several dozen men had gathered in the growing evening shadows, their hardened features glowing in the illumination of the Edison bulb. In each of their expressions was a kind of wonder, a feeling that drew Peter’s own gaze back toward the light.

  Beyond the circle of brightness cast by the bulb, the Idaho mountainside rose in a silhouette of forest toward the deepness of night sky. The river rapids rushed in the darkness. A vast, untamed landscape, and in it, this pocket of seeing. Peter felt his father’s hand descend on his shoulder, a reassuring weight, and looked up.

  “Sir?”

  “Hm?”

  “How does it work? The electricity?”

  James Force was silent for a moment. “Nobody knows.” His voice slow and thoughtful. “It’s everywhere, though. What makes everything move.”

  They watched the steady brightness of the bulb, occasional drops of spray from the rapids falling like cold sparks on Peter’s cheeks and forehead.

  The stillness of the moment was broken by a derisive snort from the crowd of watching miners. Peter and his father both turned as a stocky, balding man stepped forward, arms crossed on his chest. Peter had seen him in town, usually arguing with someone, although it took him a moment to remember the man’s name—Lucius Newton. Someone who worked with his father, but not one of his father’s friends.

  “What’s this, then?” Newton demanded loudly. “Looks like a waste of time, you ask me.”

  “No need for you to spend your time at all, Newton.” James Force shrugged mildly.

  “Looks to me like you’re wasting all these men’s time. Distracting ’em with useless gadgets and the like.” Newton approached the light, reaching out to touch the glass, then drew his finger back with a hiss.

  “Should’ve warned you. Some of these gadgets can bite.” James Force’s words drew a chuckle from the crowd. Newton wheeled to face them, glaring, and the laughter stopped. “Any case,” Peter’s father continued, “they’re here by their own choice. Last I heard, we’re all free men.”

  Newton made a kind of spitting sound and turned away. As he did, his foot caught on the wire leading to the Edison bulb and he stumbled, nearly falling, jerking the light off the tree stump. The glass shattered on the ground, darkness descending instantly. Newton straightened.

  “Look what you did. Could’ve broke my neck.” He bared his teeth at James Force. The hand on Peter’s shoulder tightened, but his father said nothing. Newton glanced down, and for an instant Peter imagined that he saw a smile on Newton’s face.

  “One of these days, boy,” Newton said, his voice quiet and conversational, “your daddy’s going to go too far.” Peter stared back at the other man, not knowing how to answer. Then Newton wheeled and stalked away into the night.

  The crowd of onlookers slowly began to disperse. Peter turned back to where the light had been. Now the wilderness night, the sound of rushing water, and the distant stars overhead were unbroken, as if they were the only things that had ever existed. But when Peter closed his eyes, for a moment he could still see an afterimage of the electric brightness: as if this light had somehow become part of himself.

  Standing in the gray New York morning at the mouth of the subway tunnel, some flicker of this memory comes back to Peter. Beside him Tobias shifts from one foot to the other, rubbing his hands in the morning cold, while Michael and Saul wait resignedly, the four of them lined up with all the other workmen from the Canal Street crew.

  In front of where they stand outside the excavation, three men wearing white laboratory coats are making adjustments to a handcart laden with machinery. The wheels of this cart are fitted to the temporary tracks along the center of the subway tunnel, but it bears no resemblance to the wooden barrows that normally carry out rubble along these rails. On the cart, a row of dials and switches are mounted above a bank of canister-shaped batteries, thick wires leading to a set of antennae that two of the men are in the process of adjusting. The third man is struggling with a large filament bulb at the front of the assembly that, unlike its twin at the back of the cart, refuses to light.

  Peter scrutinizes this operation, trying without success to make sense of the equipment, before turning to Tobias. “They do this every month, then?”

  “Ever since I’ve been here, they
have.” Tobias scowls. “Head-quarters inspection, they call it. Supposed to take no time at all, but there’s always some problem with their damn machine. So we have to wait and freeze while they do their tinkering.”

  “What are they looking for?”

  “Who knows? Making sure the tunnel’s sound, they say. But devil knows why they need that monstrosity.”

  “Quiet down there!” Flocombe shouts, and Peter glances over to see the foreman glaring in their direction from the head of the line. The rank of subway workers shifts restlessly, a handful of snowflakes drifting from the overcast sky, their collective breath forming a brief, dissipating cloud of steam.

  He looks over at the excavation that has come to define the border of his days. Near where they stand, at its mouth, it’s not much more than a deep trench occupying half the width of the street. Above it, a row of heavy girders spanning the trench forms a skeleton that will eventually be paved over again; a row of iron spikes marks the outline of where the train platform will stand. Toward the end of the block, the trench dips deeper, becoming a tunnel that resembles a rough cave, with unfinished rock walls and ceiling. For an instant, then, Peter feels a tug of homesickness for the Idaho wilderness, for the smallness and comprehensibility of that distant world.

  “—been here since six, not a bite of breakfast, and now this.” This fragment of conversation, whispered between Saul and Michael, drifting back to Peter’s ears.

  A flicker of brightness catches the corner of his vision and he turns to see the filament bulb on the cart come to life for a moment beneath the hands of the man in the lab coat, before going dark again. A vague recollection, from that long-ago day beside the mill house with his father, or from one of the other times when James Force could afford to indulge his interest in gadgetry, comes back to him.

  “The contacts,” he murmurs, half to Tobias and half to himself. “Could be the socket contacts are dirty.” Without thinking he starts to step forward, but finds Tobias’s restraining hand on his arm.

  “What are you doing?” Tobias hisses. “For God’s sake, don’t go helping them, you prancing nincompoop!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re bloodsuckers, all of them.” Tobias shakes his head impatiently. “We break our backs for stale bread and a flophouse room, just to make them rich. Those men are no friends for the likes of you and me, boy-o.”

  Peter opens his mouth, but before he can think of a reply the glass bulb on the cart blossoms into yellow brightness. With a low rumble the three men wheel their equipment into the tunnel. Strangely unsettled, he watches the light recede into the gray distance, and disappear.

  OVER THE WEEKS that follow, without realizing it, Peter falls into the rhythm of life on the subway crew. Although the work is always backbreaking, it becomes gradually less unbearable and his days assume a predictable shape: rising before dawn, the hours of labor, home for a dinner of bread, hard cheese, and pickles.

  He rents a room in a tenement apartment, a space he shares with two taciturn, seldom present Polish dockworkers, and apart from the necessities of life and weekly rent, his wages from the subway permit the occasional extravagance: beers with Paolo, Michael, and Tobias, or a meal at the cheapest of restaurants. He begins to feel as if he has been digested by the city, a tiny creature burrowing through the bedrock bowels of the metropolis, like the tiny creatures said to inhabit the bodies of other, larger organisms.

  This routine is abruptly shattered on a cold afternoon during Peter’s second month on the subway crew when one of the steam donkeys screams, lurches, and shudders into silence. A surge of pressure tears down one of the hoses leading to the pneumatic drills while the others go slack. The arms of the man holding the drill break with a brittle sound that is heard throughout the cavern. The worker drops to his knees, staring at his splayed wrists in disbelief, and the other men let their tools fall and rush toward him. The door of the foreman’s shack bangs open and Flocombe lurches out.

  Unlike the others, though, Peter remains frozen where he stands, just outside the tunnel entrance. Since his arrival in New York, something about the engines has fascinated him, making him slow whenever he walks past one of the jealously guarded machines, and now the wail of metallic distress echoes through him. He starts toward the silent engine, wisps of black smoke still rising from its stack. Beside the steam donkey, Flocombe is already haranguing the two shovel-men who feed the machine coal.

  “What the hell’d you do?”

  “She just stopped—”

  “Like that—”

  “These things don’t just stop. You know this monster is worth more than the two of your fancy hides?”

  “I swear, we was just here an’ then—”

  “And now, goddamnit, I have to file a goddamn report, call the mechanic—and wait till he hears, eh? You know he hates coming down here—”

  “Can’t you fix it, Boss?”

  “Fix it?” The foreman swigs from his flask and glares at the two workers. “You think I’m some kind of professor?”

  Standing unnoticed beside the machine, Peter kneels beside the engine and leans forward, studying the interlocking jigsaw of its gears and hoses.

  “And what’re you looking at, then?” Flocombe’s voice jolts Peter back to himself.

  “I—”

  “You don’t touch the damned thing, understand?”

  Peter nods and watches the foreman stomp away. Around the construction site the other crewmen have broken off into little groups, standing around the coal stoves, stamping their feet and smoking cigarettes. He allows his eyes to drift over the engine.

  “Here it is—just quit.” Peter wakes, as if from a dream, to these words and turns to find Flocombe and another man standing a few feet away. He clambers to his feet, strangely embarrassed—as if caught in some act of intimacy—his legs stiff from crouching too long.

  “So? Let me look.” The foreman’s companion is a short, heavy-set man with protruding ears and a melancholy expression, the filigree of veins on his nose mapping out years of drink. This is Klaus Neumann, one of the four mechanics employed by the subway project to maintain the engines that are slowly hollowing out the space beneath Manhattan. He pushes past Peter, eyes only on the inert piece of machinery, and scrutinizes it for a moment. Leaning forward, he mutters to himself and runs his hands over the curve of the boiler.

  Flocombe clears his throat, swaying slightly. “Er—is it bad, then?”

  Neumann straightens and glances, annoyed, at the foreman. “Bad? No, not bad,” he says, his English marked by a thick German accent. “Give me half an hour.” The mechanic extracts a rolled oilskin from his satchel, which he unfurls to reveal an assortment of tools. Glancing around, he notices Peter for the first time.

  “Who is this?” he demands.

  “One of my men. A sharp one.” Flocombe shrugs. “He’s been staring at the damn thing like it was a woman, since it broke.”

  “Like a woman, eh?” Neumann gives Peter an appraising glance and then makes a small gesture toward the machine. “Can you see what is broken here, boy?”

  Peter shakes his head. The engine is vastly more complicated than any of the crude devices that he tinkered with, beside his father, on the Idaho frontier: the baroque landscape of its parts a message coded in some incomprehensible language.

  “Look harder,” the mechanic insists. Feeling foolish, like a small child being taught a lesson, Peter stares at the intestinal tangle of wheels and gears. The cold winter wind cutting into his hands and face, his soaked and muddy shoes, the burnt smell of the air. He glances at Flocombe, hoping to be dismissed—but the foreman turns away, toward the steam donkey. Without thinking, Peter follows his gaze.

  Then suddenly, like an image snapping into focus, he sees a small wheel out of place in the midst of the tangled metal—given by a logic that he cannot describe. He points.

  “There?”

  The mechanic furrows his brow and stares at Peter. He shakes his head.r />
  “Yes,” he says, “this is it.” He looks at the foreman, then back at Peter. “What is your name?”

  A MONTH LATER, as the year lurches to a close, winter wraps the city in an icy grip. At eight o’clock on a Thursday night, Peter and Neumann sit in McGurk’s Suicide Hall, cheapest of cheap dives by the river. For reasons that Peter has yet to discover, McGurk’s is the mechanic’s haunt of choice: in part, perhaps, for its abundance of loose women, where a roll in the hay will cost little enough to go unnoticed, or at least unremarked, when Neumann’s wife counts his pay. But more significantly, Peter thinks, because the place seems to express some need of his mentor’s for anarchy and oblivion. Some urge or dark pull, exerted by the clamor of the city itself, that Peter has felt as well but has fought against, more out of instinct than any clear reason.

  They sit on the narrow second-floor balcony that looks onto a central shaft that runs the four-story height of the saloon. Leaning over the balcony edge to watch the barroom below is a perilous maneuver—the danger of falling inconsequential next to the hail of tobacco-wads, phlegm, and even glasses that patrons on the topmost floors enjoy hurling at those below when the opportunity arises—but the show on the ground floor is worth the risk: whores in pancake makeup flirt with sailors at the bar, pickpockets ply their trade, brawls break out at the rate of two or three an hour. Neumann sits silently, staring into his drink, a noxious mixture of alcohol, benzene, turpentine, and cocaine sweepings that cheap saloons by the river sell under the name of “smash,” gnawing his thumb. It is, Peter has come to understand, the closest that his mentor comes to relaxed: this near-stupor that descends on him in the evenings.

  Over the past weeks, Peter has been initiated into a world that he struggles to understand, working as Neumann’s assistant. Already he has learned to interpret the grunts and silences that make up the taciturn mechanic’s vocabulary: requests for tools, points to observe. The principle of a machine’s functioning compressed into: “See there?” and a jerk of the thumb.