Hammer and Tongs and a Rusty Nail

by Ian Tregillis

  Jube fiddled with a pile of magazines, absently squaring and re-squaring it. “The more I think about it … It doesn’t sound so crazy to me, Wally. Nothing against Morlock-and-Eloi, of course, salt of the earth that woman, but if I had to be honest, she was never quite the same after the fight club took her. And you’d probably be the most honest guy to ever stand for any public office.”

  “Aw, nuts. Not you, too?”

  Jube shrugged. “I’m just saying.”

  Mr. McNathlaunched into his paint-shaker nod again. “Exactly! So am I.” He turned again to Wally. “As a member of the Committee, you’ve traveled around the globe, trying to make things right for people. But on the city council, you could do the same for your friends, your neighbors, even your family. Like your work for the Jerusha Carter School—which I applaud, by the way. Little acts of betterment every day, without people shooting at you. It’s getting merchants to shovel their sidewalks promptly, not stopping genocides. It’s improving signage for school crossing zones, not dodging Exocet missiles in a border dispute.”

  Wally frowned. “The genocide stuff is important, too.”

  For the first time since he crossed the street, Mr. McNath stopped fidgeting for a moment. He just stared. But a moment later he was nodding again. “Yes, yes, of course it is. So, think of the city council as in-addition-to, not instead-of.” He sure talked fast.

  But he was sorta convincing, too.

  * * *

  As an apology for ruining her day off with the mess at the scrap yard, Wally took Darcy out to breakfast. Hollandays was her favorite place for sit-down morning food, and he often felt the need to apologize for something, so they were regulars. The food wasn’t too bad, though the corned beef hash didn’t come with a slice of Spam on the side the way his dad did it back home. But that was okay.

  Their table was quiet but for the clinking of silverware in his hands and the occasional crinkle of folded newsprint. Darcy always read the paper while she finished her coffee.

  She sipped, then clinked the cup back into her saucer without looking away from the paper. Once again, their server seemed to appear out of thin air, swooping by to replenish Darcy’s nearly-full cup. The service was particularly attentive today: because Darcy would have to go straight to the precinct from the restaurant, she wore her uniform. Wally wondered if maybe she’d timed it that way on purpose. People gotrealnice when they saw the badge.

  He spread boysenberry jam on another piece of toast, then used it to mop up the last of his eggs Benedict. He could never remember what it was called, but he liked the fancy yellow sauce they poured on top of the eggs. He had the impression it might have been invented there.

  Darcy sat up, sloshing coffee. “What the hell is this?”

  Wally started. The stainless steelbutter knife in his hand dissolved into a fine orange powder. “Oops,” he said, scattering rust across his plate, the formerly white tablecloth, and her coffee.

  Looking for their server, he said, “What is what?”

  Darcy held the paper up between them, smacking it lightly with the back of her fingers.

  He leaned forward, squinting. “Oh, yeah! I forgot all about that. Neat, huh?”

  She glanced at the paper again. “You forgot that you’re running for city council?”

  Wally caught their server’s eye, pointed at the rust on the table, and the remaining silverware, and shrugged, mouthing, “Sorry.” To Darcy he said, “I mean, I forgot to tell you about it. Only Ghost knows. Oh, and Jube. And that real nice fella who suggested it in the first place. And now you. And I suppose all the people who see it in the paper. But it’s only”—he checked his watch—“seven-thirty in the morning. So you’re one of the first.” He grinned.

  Darcy placed the folded newspaper over her plate. “Okay. Walk me through this. You hate politics.”

  So he explained the whole thing. He liked the way it made him feel, helping people. Everything the Committee did got so complicated, no matter how obvious and necessary it was. And his other job was just work. It wasn’t a cause and didn’t have a goal, except to make money for Mr. Matthews.

  After he finished, Darcy asked, “Did this ‘real nice fella’ give you his card?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you ask for one?”

  “Nope.”

  “And you weren’t the least bit curious about who he was or why he sought you out?”

  “Nope.” She watched him as if waiting for more. So he added, “I figured he’d heard about me. Maybe from the other parents at school.”

  “But if you wanted to talk to him again…”

  “Oh, I see him all the time lately. We just keep running into each other, like, one coincidence after another. Crazy!”

  “Uh-huh. But if somebody wanted to go talk to him, how would she do that?”

  “I’m sure he’s in the phone book. Oh! I remember now. He works for the Joker thingamajiggy.”

  It took a while to unravel that, but she eventually figured out what he meant. He didn’t understand why she was getting grumpy about the whole thing. After all, her job was all about helping people. He said as much.

  At that, her expression softened. She put her hand on his arm. “Hey, I’m not trying to rain on your parade. You’re a really good guy and I know you’d take working on the city council as seriously as you take raising your daughter. And thanks to you she probably won’t grow up to be an axe murderer. You’d pour your big stupid heart into it. And probably drive people crazy and maybe, just maybe, do some good along the way. But have you really thought this through? The city council in New York City is a world apart from the city council in Mountain Iron, Minnesota.”

  “Back home that was Mr. Lacosky, the principal, and Mrs. Pikkanen, who owns the gas station and bait shop.”

  “See, that’s exactly what I mean.” She squeezed his arm before withdrawing. “Are you sure about this?”

  He thought it over. “Yep.”

  “Then I wish you the very best of luck, and I hope the people of Jokertown will soon be fortunate enough to have you in their corner.” She picked up the paper again. “And anyway, your opponent is completely off her nut. So that’s another point in your favor.”

  “Opponent?” That made it sound like a boxing match. He didn’t like that. He’d had the impression there wouldn’t be anybody else. Truth be told, that had been no small part of the appeal of running in the first place. The eggs Benedict turned a little bit sour in his stomach.

  Wally leaned across the table, giving the small item in the paper a more careful read-through: Local Activists Throw Hats into J-Town Council Race. He wondered which of his hats he’d have to give up. The fella in the suit hadn’t mentioned that part. He also hadn’t mentioned Jan Chang, who was listed as another candidate for the empty Jokertown seat.

  “You know her?”

  “Oh yeah. She once accused me of using parking tickets as a cover for attaching extrajudicial GPS tracking units to prominent citizens’ cars without a warrant. Said I was working to usher in aone-world-government junta by making it possible for the Illuminati drones to know exactly where to find and kill those same prominent citizens in a ‘decapitation strike.’” Wally didn’t understand any of that. Darcy raised her cup as if to take a sip, then saw the rust floating on it, and put it down again. “If there’s some crazy claim going around, Jan is probably behind it. Everybody knows better than to believe her, of course.”

  That was sad. It made him feel sorry for this lady.

  Darcy balled up her napkin andtossed it on the table. “The more I think about it, I’m almost looking forward to the round-table forum. Between you and her, it’ll be one for the record books. I wonder if my DVR can record public-access cable.”

  He missed most of that. “What kind of table?”

  “I mean the candidates’ forum.” Darcy ran her finger to the very bottom of the little two-inch piece about the special city council election. “There’s a list of events.”

 
So there was. He sighed. “Aw, cripes.”

  * * *

  Mordecai was popping the fuel tank from a 1960 Moto Guzzi Cardellino when a battered, rust-splotched Impalacame to a noisy stop (squeaky brakes) on the street nearby. Mordecai knew from the parking job that it wasn’t Darcy behind the wheel. Plus, she didn’t seem to be the kind of woman who tolerated unfixed fender benders and naked Bondo.

  Wally blinked in the sun, looking a bit confused, as if he didn’t remember being here a few days ago. He definitely had been, as the cracks in the concrete floor of the repair bay could attest. He took a few steps toward the shop entrance, then froze, looking up. He turned in place, head craned back, presumably searching for magnets. Wiping his oily hands with a rag, Mordecai went to the office.

  Rochelle, who managed and kept an eye on the front of the shop when Mordecai was working (though it had been a very long time since anybody had tried to rob the Harlem Hammer), turned as he entered. She indicated Wally behind the counter, the shifting of whose jaw suggested a smile.

  “This gentleman is here to see you.”

  Wally waved. “Howdy! You probably don’t remember me, but I was here a few days ago. I’m Wally, by the way.”

  “I remember. You seem to be doing better.”

  “Gosh. I was in a jam and you sure helped me out.”

  Mordecai shrugged. “You clearly needed help. I’m glad it worked out and that you’re okay.”

  Wally offered his hand. Mordecai moved to shake it, but then he realized the metal man’s iron fingers were curled around something. A frayed tuft of green ribbon dangled from his palm. “I brought you this to say thankyou for pulling me down and being so swell about it. Here.”

  He turned his closed hand over Mordecai’s cupped palms. The ribbon had been used to bundle together a collection of mechanical pencils, click erasers, and ball-point pens. A mismatched collection, but new and nice.

  “Uh. Thank you. But it really isn’t necessary.”

  “I heard that you’re a crossword puzzler fella, so I thought, what does a guy who does crosswords need? Pencils! And then erasers, too.” Wally pointed at the click erasers. “But then I also thought, he seems like a sharp one, and I heard sometimes real smart people even do the puzzles in pen. So I got them pens, too.” He pointed again, elaborating, “In case you do the puzzles in ink, see.”

  Rochelle, turning red with the effort not to burst out laughing, excused herself. As she headed for the break room, Mordecai said, “Thank you, Wally. This is very nice—”

  “Oh! I forgot the extra leads. For the pencils, you know.” Wally fished around in the breast pocket of his denim overalls and retrieved a little plastic cylinder.

  Mordecai took this, too. Wally seemed to be waiting for something, so he said, “You know what? I’ll use them every day. I haven’t missed the daily puzzle in years. Thank you.”

  “You betcha.” Wally looked around. “Sure is a nice fix-’em-up shop you got here.”

  “Uh, thank you.”

  “You know, I was in that scrapyard the other day because I sorta accidentally rusted up the handlebars on this other fella’s bike. He got kinda sore about it so I was looking for a replacement…”

  Mordecai laughed. “Hey, that’s what we do. If you have the model information, leave it with Rochelle, and have the owner call us.”

  “Oh, that’s swell! I’ll pay, ‘cause it was my fault.” Wally beamed. Or seemed to. (Damned if it wasn’t tricky, reading that metal face.) But he didn’t appear in a hurry to go anywhere.

  “Would you like a tour?”

  “Gosh, that’d be neat.”

  So they went through the side door into the repair bay containing the partially disassembled Moto Guzzi and the ghostly scent of gasoline. “Neato,” said Wally, not really looking at anything. Speaking over the radio, which Mordecai hadn’t bothered to turn off and which was now playing something from the Dave Brubeck Quartet, the joker-ace said, “Um. So, hey, fella, this’ll sound nuts, but did you know we’ve met before? I mean, before the other day. Years ago.”

  Aha. So that’s what this was about. Mordecai wanted to hash this out even less than he wanted to chow down on a barrel of accursed Kazakh strontium. But even though he could see the slow-motion train wreck coming from a mile away, he felt powerless to avoid it. Even the strongest man in the world couldn’t change the path of a loaded freight train once it was barreling down the tracks. Not without hurting a lot of people. He sighed.

  “On the TV show.”

  “Oh. You do remember American Hero.” The metal man’s tone of voice suggested he hoped nobody remembered.

  “I sort of regret doing it. I thought I’d have more opportunities to mentor younger folks.” Mordecai figured he had a good thirty years on Wally.

  “I wish I’d never been on the show at all. But I’m still glad I applied to be a contestant. I mean, it was exciting at first and all, and I suppose that without it I wouldn’t have the life I have today, with a daughter and all.” Wally trailed off. “If not for the show, I’d be working in an iron mine right now.”

  “I bet you’d be good at that. You certainly have the, uh, look for it.” Did they still use steam shovels? Mordecai didn’t know the first thing about mining. He supposed that nowadays everything was diesel or electric.

  Wally took a deep breath. Rivets creaked when his chest swelled. “The thing is, that fella who won? He said I said some stuff I didn’t say. So I just wanted to say that I didn’t say the stuff he said I said.”

  And there it was. Way back on the first season of American Hero, Rustbelt had been eliminated from the contest (“discarded,” ugh) after being accused by the eventual winner, Stuntman, of hurling a racial slur at him.

  Mordecai closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. Wally seemed decent. Guileless, at the very least. Mordecai remembered the incident, and the flap at the time, and his doubts about the accusation. But the show’s producers had latched onto the narrative twist—it was manna from heaven for people whose livelihoods involved spinning plotted drama from pointless contrived interactions—and that was that. SoWally had gone off to Egypt to defend the helpless, taking a bunch of contestants with him.

  But people were complicated. You could never truly know what lurked in somebody’s heart. And Mordecai was so damn tired, furiously tired, of the “I’m not racist, but” types.

  When he opened his eyes, Wally added, “Honest.” His skin made a grinding sound and even threw a couple of sparks when he drew his fingertip in a little “x” across his chest.

  Mordecai’s gut told him Wally was sincere. He wanted to believe it, at any rate. So he made a decision. Surprising himself a little bit, he said, “Let’s watch the clip, then.”

  The shop had several laptops for pulling diagnostic codes from bikes a lot more modern and sophisticated than the Moto Guzzi. And Rochelle had dragged their credit card processing into the twenty-first century with a wireless network. So, after wiping the worst of the grease from the nearest keyboard (an inevitability in a repair shop), Mordecai started searching for, “american hero season 1 clips rustbelt stuntman.”

  It took a bit of digging to find the desired needle in a haystack of manufactured drama. But after a few minutes he landed on a listicle titled, “The 15 Most Shocking Moments on American Hero, Seasons I-IX.” Merely reading that made him cringe. He could feel his crossword skill leaking away.

  He clicked play. The screen filled with slickly edited footage of Jamal Norwood, aka Stuntman, scrambling to get somewhere ahead of Wally. Mordecai recalled nothing of the hokey weekly challenges, only that they were uniformly inane. And, like this one, often loud. The as-televised segment showed the two aces coming close, Rustbelt’s jaw moving, and then Stuntman whirling toward the cameras, releasing his hold on the Jetboy statue that had been the object of the hunt. Faintly, over the hurricane whoosh of the helicopter, he could be heard screaming, “Did you hear what he called me. What kind of racist shit is that?”

&
nbsp; Mordecai turned up the volume as high as it would go and hit replay. It took more than one rewatch, but Mordecai eventually convinced himself he might have heard a barely audible “n—” coming from Wally.

  He turned. “Well?”

  “I called him a knucklehead.” Wally’s gaze went to the cracked floor. “It wasn’t nice of me. He, just, gosh, that fella was being so mean. I guess he got under my skin. Maybe he did it on purpose.”

  Sadly, there would only be one side to this story, as Jamal had given his life in the line of duty, working for SCARE. But Mordecai felt confident that if the man standing next to him was one thing, it was sincere. On balance, he decided, his gut reaction from way back then was affirmed.

  “Yeah. I figured as much.”

  Wally deflated like a rusted-out lead balloon. “Whew. I’m so glad.”

  Mordecai closed the laptop, eager to get back to work. “Worry no more. Go forth and keep doing what you’re doing.”

  “That’s actually what I wanted to ask you about.”

  Good heavens, there was more?

  He nodded at the laptop. “I thought that was it.”

  “I thought maybe there’d be no point without clearing up the TV stuff first.”

  Jerking a thumb at the disembodied fuel tank, Mordecai said, “I do need to finish this today, so…”

  “I’m running for city council so I need a campaign manager,” Wally blurted.

  That took a moment to sink in. “I’m sorry?”

  The younger ace explained, in a not particularly eloquent but thoroughly transparent way, about a special election in Jokertown.

  “Well, I’m flattered. But, for one thing, I abhor party politics, and for another, obviously I don’t live in Jokertown.” Mordecai spread his arms, indicating the shop and, by extension, the neighborhood around it. The spot where they stood was miles north of J-town.

  “Nope.”

  “Then why ask me?”