The Weight of Living

by Michael Daigle

  Bassett was the former route of the Morris Canal that helped raise Ironton to economic heights it never reached again. When the canal failed, the ditch was filled and paved over, and when the old Union Iron Mill was closed and removed, all that remained of a once-glorious and profitable past was a bronze plaque screwed into the rear wall of an old warehouse.

  Nagler’s grandfather told him stories about the canal, about the mule-drawn boats tying up along the waterway and the canalmen stopping to get oysters at Dory’s oyster shop, or cloth for shirts and dresses; traded corn they got from some Roxbury farmer for hardware to make repairs. Then at night, the boats would tie up in the big basin that the city turned into a park and the air would hum with life.

  Nothing hums here anymore, Nagler thought, lost in a silence so deep the loudest shout would not penetrate it.

  This is the city of the lonely; no wonder I feel at home.

  What if they don’t find me? How desperate a cry was that?

  He paused at the intersection of Blackwell and Prospect and scanned each building, each window and storefront. As he looked down the long straightaway of Blackwell, the grainy video of the young girl being thrown out of the SUV filled his vision. That was where it happened. There were apartments here, but when asked, the tenants said they had not heard or seen anything. Of course they hadn’t. A stone-dead quiet street in the middle of the night and a young girl screaming.

  He smiled when he glanced at the theater. A great Vaudeville house, touring plays, the biggest, loudest showplace in the region. There were so many teenagers making out in the balcony there almost weren’t enough seats, and all the ushers looked the other way, or simply stayed downstairs. A lot of Ironton High School girls, and even a few boys, he recalled being shocked to learn, got dirty knees in that balcony, he knew: even Martha. And a lot of panties, slipped down over knees and bobbysocks and penny loafers got lost under the seats. Then on the summer nights when he got the car, the pair of them, a blanket stretched on the hood of the old Pontiac, their pale skin gleaming in the moonlight, her taste on his fingers and lips. Yes, Lauren, Martha was a member of that club, maybe the founding member.

  Stop, he thought. She’s not coming back; Lauren was right, there is room for both of them.

  What’s that?

  Hanging from the theater marquee was a video camera. He had not recalled Ramirez showing him any scenes from that angle. Had they not cooperated, or was that a new security camera?

  He stepped into the covered entry and examined the postings along the walls inside the glass and metal displays that once held posters of coming film attractions. Most were just old announcements, aged yellow and torn, or warnings not to loiter or litter, but one was a permit.

  “Blackwell Enterprises, LLC. d/b/a, Mine Hill Foundation.”

  Nagler wrote down the name and phone number. Maybe a real estate company that owned the place?

  He tucked the pad inside a jacket pocket. Who knows? At this point, anything would help.

  His phone rang, and John Guidrey’s name flashed on the screen.

  “Shit, I forgot to call him back,” Nagler muttered. The phone rang again, then a half-ring, and then to voicemail. I need to look at those files.

  ****

  He turned to walk back to the police station and caught his left heel on a deep sidewalk crack. The pain shot through the stretched tendons in his foot and he bent over in agony. He reached for a parking meter for support and closed his eyes, as first his foot cramped up and then his ankle. He pressed his toe into the sidewalk to counteract the spreading cramp and gritted his teeth. “Damn it.” He broke into a sweat and felt mild nausea rising. The last time it had hurt this much was in the fall when he tripped jumping some steps in pursuit of a drug suspect. Then the cramp released, first in the ankle and then in his foot. He wiped sweat from his brow and breathed deeply as the pain receded. “Fuck,” he whispered. “Fuck me.” And he took a few more shallow breaths.

  Nagler looked up from the sidewalk. Half-a-block away, crossing the street, facing the center of downtown, was Patrolman Garrett Alton. He was wearing dark jeans and an oversized hoodie, and he flipped back the hood before he unlocked the door of a red Ford pick-up and stepped inside.

  Nagler limped toward the intersection and watched the truck run the light as it made a right turn onto Warren. Nagler concentrated on the license plate ... A...Z...B... then nothing.

  He called Ramirez.

  “Maria, I just saw Alton in a red pick-up, a Ford, heading south on Warren from Blackwell. License, AZB... three numerals.” A train whistle sounded. “Hear that, Maria? A train whistle. There a good chance that both the Warren and Morris street crossings could be shut down. Patrol could pin him in.”

  “On it,” Ramirez replied.

  Was he following me?

  At the Warren intersection, Nagler saw that the eastbound commuter train had stalled and heard the sirens of patrol cars arriving. He limped the block to the rail line. Maybe they have him cornered.

  Instead, when he turned past the edge of the building on that corner, he saw the red pick-up truck stopped between the crossing gates, blocking both tracks, surrounded by three patrolmen. Cars and truck stalled in the street honked, and their drivers stood next to their vehicles, shouting.

  “Maria,” he yelled into his phone, trying to walk quickly toward the scene. “What’s going on at the tracks? I jammed my foot and ain’t very mobile at the moment.”

  Her sighed filled his ear. “Truck’s empty, Frank. Patrol is checking to see if it is wired for anything and then they’ll push it off the tracks into the parking lot.”

  “Damn it. Tell whoever is in charge I’m a block away. Alton was wearing a big gray hoodie. He can’t be far.”

  At the truck, Nagler asked the patrolman if he saw Alton leave.

  The kid shook his head. “No, sir, That’s me parked on Blackwell blocking traffic from entering the area. But I could see the cab was empty even a block away.”

  Nagler looked around, into gray acreage of the main parking lot, up the steep hill on Morris and west along the track. Crap, he could have gone anywhere.

  “What’s your best guess, officer?”

  “Well, I was running toward the tracks, and didn’t see anyone running away from the intersection on this side. But I couldn’t see the other side well. My guess? Into the rail yard.”

  Nagler limped between stalled cars, across the tracks and halfway up the hill, which provided him a partial overview of both the parking lot and the rail service yard.

  The parking lot to his right had five or six entry points and at the south end spilled into a park, athletic fields and an old cemetery, all connected to streets that leaked into dense neighborhoods. No, too wide open.

  To the west, the rail yard ran on for a half-mile and was filled with dozens of passenger cars, engines, and work vehicles; fences on either side separated it from Blackwell Street and an old mill. Paths ran into dead-ends and one led to the river and Smelly Flats.

  Nagler stared into the mesmerizing, slow shifting of passenger cars from track to track, and the shuddering stops, followed by the metallic crash of couplings as workers connected the cars, preparing for rush hour. Too many places to slide and hide, Nagler thought; he could have walked in a straight line between cars for a half-mile and not be seen. Ramirez called: The plates were stolen off an ’02 Mazda out of Trenton and the truck lifted from a dealer in Flemington. And Alton in the wind.

  Hopeless, fucking hopeless.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The ghosts be talkin’ and we be listenin’

  Jimmy Dawson wrote: “Can you make music from an old building? Are the hammer strokes just metal on metal, or are they the chimes where history and the future meet in one square corner joint? I ask because something remarkable has happened. Something as positive as this old city has seen since the great flood nearly washed its future into the Atlantic.”

  Dawson smiled as he reread the press release from City
Hall. A half-million-dollar grant had been given to Ironton to activate a plan to redevelop the three blocks surrounding Leonard’s bookstore. The key agency was a non-profit created by Leonard a few years back, and its partner was the city’s planning office, headed by Lauren Fox.

  How much politicking led to that deal? Dawson wondered. The project was one of the first efforts proposed by Rashad Jackson after his election as mayor.

  A concern for another day, Dawson thought, as he filed the brief story on the announcement to his website, shut down the computer and joined the group in the street.

  The shells of old buildings flanked Leonard’s bookstore like ghosts with gray eyes, silent shades, voices stilled. Dawson filed the thought away for another story.

  “Ready?” asked Delvin Williams.

  “You bet,” said Dominique.

  Del unlocked the front door to the former Gold Wave Manufacturing Co. — the name hid behind the dust on the frosted-glass window pane that filled the upper half of the door — and shook open the reluctant door.

  “Look at all this stuff,” exclaimed Dominique, the youthful crew chief. “They just left it here.”

  His boss, Delvin Williams, just smiled. “Just didn’t need it. The mill closed down, the workers took their tools and what else they could carry, the secretaries took their belongings, and maybe the desk flowers, and the boss just locked the doors.”

  “And they left silence,” Dawson said. “Silence nailed behind plywood frames. What was said in that third-floor meeting room when the plant’s production was planned; what whispered gossip slyly swirled among the office staff?”

  “Hey, Jimmy, what’s in these old cabinets?” Dom asked, pulling out a handful of old paper files.

  Dawson looked over his shoulder. Ledgers, corporate histories on faded green-lined paper, precise columns of numbers, unreadable notes in the margins.

  “Look at this stuff. Looks like a financial history,” Dawson exclaimed. “With enough of these we could see the creation, success, and failure of this old plant, see its mathematical rise and fall.”

  The reporter shifted over to a dusty window that overlooked a broad, empty space that might have been an office and thought, what’s missing are the sounds that filled this space: the cries of joyful success, or the harsh voices that debated its fate, torn with anguish when those last decisions were made and the order given. The voices live in the dust.

  “This needs to be saved,” Del said. “Have some guys box this stuff up. Maybe the historical society would want it.”

  “Got it, man,” Dom replied. “This is the place, you know. I think my granddad worked here and a couple of uncles. This is the place....”

  Then with his head bobbing, one foot tapping and his hands knocking out syncopation, Dom began:

  “This is the place, the place of the mas-ter.

  This is the place, the place that mat-tered.

  Tired fingers moldin’, sweaty brows leanin’

  Turnin’ rock into iron and iron into bread.

  This is the place where we all gathered

  This is the place where the tide is turnin’

  The ghosts be talkin’ and we be listenin’

  Raisin’ the dead, knowin’ the iron and the bread....”

  Then Dom stopped and shrugged.

  “Work on it later.”

  Del just smiled and grabbed the boy’s shoulder. “Cool, man.”

  Dom just nodded. “We can make something of this old wreck.”

  “I think you already have.”

  Del, Dom, and Dawson turned to face the open door, where Leonard and Calista Knox stood grinning.

  “I knew this old place had rhythm,” she said.

  “It’s more than that,” Leonard said. “It’s a soul. I used to hear it. I’d lie awake at night. Imagine the pounding of metal presses, the grinding of a sander and wheels, the shouts of workers. Feel the hiss as the iron was quenched, the clatter of the loading of the trucks, the whine of the rail whistle as a load was hauled away.”

  “Them old sounds ain’t goin’ away,” Del said. “They livin’ in the walls, and I believe they just talked to our young man here.”

  “Know what I hear?” Calista asked. “I hear the voices of poets rising to replace the industrial crunch; to be or not to be, Lear’s anguish, Ahab’s wail, and Pooh’s laughter. All those voices leaking out of the walls.”

  After a moment, the group laughed and Leonard said, “Big dreams here,” and nodding to Del and Dom, “and a lot of work to do.”

  Del just smiled. “Yeah, Lenny.”

  A cool breeze chilled the sweat on all their faces as they stepped out of the dark, dusty mill. Outside Bobby leaned on a stack of boxes, one of five, all five high, that filled the sidewalk.

  “Hey, Dom, grab a couple of guys and help me get these inside,” Bobby yelled.

  “Got it, boss,” Dom said as he headed to the back of the book shop.

  “You need to see this, Leonard,” Bobby said as Leonard, Calista, and Del approached his piles. “This just showed up, twenty-five boxes of books. Letter attached said they are from an estate that lost its building when it ran out of money.”

  Leonard reached out for a stack of the boxes and ran his fingers across the dusty tops; he pushed one box to test the weight.

  “Who’s the letter from?” he asked Bobby.

  “Let me see... estate executor ... Bruno Hapworth. Hey, isn’t that Frank’s old lawyer buddy?”

  “Do you think this is legitimate?” Leonard asked.

  “Bruno is Bruno,” Dawson shrugged. “You know him. He was one of Ironton’s notorious ambulance chasers, and lately, based on some reporting I’ve been doing, seems to be taking part in a few sketchy real estate deals.” He nodded toward Bobby. “What’s the name of the estate? I have to be in Morristown tomorrow. I’ll look it up in probate.”

  Bobby held up the letter and the envelope. “Mine Hill Foundation, ah, just a P.O. box, 416, a Morristown address.”

  Calista reached a hand over to touch the top box, and leaned in to read the address. “Could I see the envelope?”

  Bobby shrugged and handed it to her. Calista’s face darkened and she let out a short breath; then she smiled and said, “Interesting. I wonder what mysteries those books hold.”

  Dawson asked to examine the envelope, flicked a look at it and handed it to Bobby. “Thanks,” he said. He looked over at Calista, who briefly met his glance before she stepped beside Leonard and wrapped an arm into his crooked elbow. She whispered into his ear, and Leonard grinned.

  Dawson lifted a few of the loose flaps on a couple of the top boxes then stopped. The cardboard was stiff and wrinkled, the layers separating like it had once been wet. “Oh, sorry, Leonard. This is your stuff.”

  Leonard frowned, puzzled. “Bobby, have the boys put this in the far back corner, out of the way, until we’re sure what it is. When we figure what all this is, Jimmy, you can take a look.”

  “Got it, Leonard.”

  Dawson completed the column he wrote about the new venture:

  “Later, sitting in my car as I watched the day’s work end, I realized I had answered my own question.

  “The music of the old mill didn’t end, just changed. The crash of a sledge on steel was replaced by the rat-a-tat of a nail gun fixing siding, the shouted queries and answers from workers on the open mill floor replaced by a hum of youthful voices singing snatches of song or trading rap lines — ‘Who say? They say. Who say? We say.’

  “This is a city that has lost its way.

  “Maybe that happened because we stopped listening to the jazz of a working life, stopped listening to the lessons pinned behind old boarded-up windows; the screech of that first nail being pulled out of a board could be the clarinet that opens Gershwin’s ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ or the thunder of Beethoven’s Fifth, or the sound of our beginning.”

  Calista’s look, he decided, was not one of new interests in old books, but one of fear.

 
CHAPTER TWELVE

  Another part of the curse

  “So Bruno Hapworth is the attorney for this Mine Hill Foundation?”

  Nagler winced while Calista Knox pushed on his left foot and wrenched his ankle back and forth. She had offered to tend to his damaged foot after Nagler limped slowly into Leonard’s store after the brief encounter with Garrett Alton.

  “Why’s that important?” asked Dawson.

  “Because that was the name on the permit at the old theater,” Nagler said. “Seems they own the building. And he’s giving away their books?”

  “And according to the letter they sent with the books Bobby received, they have no money,” Leonard said. “What’s going on, Frank? Maybe we should try to send those books back.”

  “But where?” Nagler asked. “You told me there was only a P.O. box.”

  Leonard nodded.

  “Well, look. Set them aside for now. I’m trying to track down Hapworth.”

  Calista pulled down Nagler’s pant leg and placed his foot on the floor. “Leave your shoe off for a while,” she said. “You really need to stay off them, you know, your feet.”

  Nagler smiled. “Thanks, Calista. But I can’t.”

  “I could lend you my old motorized wheelchair, Frank,” Leonard said, to everyone’s laughter.

  “Better yet, I should get one of those electronic two-wheeled carts they use for Disneyland tours,” Nagler chuckled. “I could be tearing down the street after the bad guys at a terrifying three miles an hour.”

  Dawson stood up to leave. “I told these guys earlier I’m going to dig into the Mine Hill Foundation in Morristown. A friend in the county office will help me sort through some paper files.”

  “Okay. If you find any more information on Hapworth, call me. I reached out to him the other day, but have had no reply. We need him.” Nagler laughed. “Never thought I’d say that, needing Hapworth.”

  “Why?’