The Cordwainer

  Chapter Nineteen

  Sophie Opts Out

  The theft of the freezer motor from Putter's Café set into motion a chain of events that would ultimately lead to the premature departure of The Cordwainer. Fluky, Mitty and myself were to flee Boot Hill, tails between our legs, escaping our imminent arrest.

  My first indication of the encroaching danger was at The Shop that first Monday morning in August, directly after the theft of Putter's freezer coil and my encounter with Concession men in their black car. I was called into Foreman Salmon's office and told to take a seat.

  We were alone in the office, Mr. Salmon and I, but the presence of the Concession men could keenly be felt.

  “Now, you know how important family is to us here at The Shop,” Foreman Salmon began. I didn't like the sound of where a sentence like that was headed. The ax was inevitably about to fall – for my optimization efforts on Line Number Six, and the rumbles of unionization that it had caused. It had to be coming. Perhaps, when the theft of the freezer coil was discovered Sunday, the Concession men had put two and two together. I didn't know. I doubted that I ever would really know. “Your father has worked here – worked for me – for almost twenty-five years...” Mr. Salmon continued.

  I was barely paying attention. I had form 24-01 in my back pocket. I'd spent an evening with a gum eraser removing as much of my failed schematic as I could. If I'd wanted to, I could have just reached back and handed over the errant form – it might have been seen as some sort a peace offering – but I couldn't bring myself to do it. If they were going to fire me, if that was how they dealt with innovation and progress, I almost welcomed the chop.

  After all, before the month was out, The Cordwainer would be fully tested and operational. Potentially, in a month, I could have a cool two hundred and fifty grand in my pocket. I wouldn't need Foreman Salmon's lousy job, or any other job for that matter. What could I buy for two hundred and fifty grand? The mind boggles. The whole town of Boot Hill, part and parcel, that was for sure, and still have change left over.

  I could have handed over form 24-01, yes, I could have made an effort to save my career, but a large part of me wanted to get fired. The hours at The Shop were starting to interfere with my work on The Cordwainer; there was still all that peroxide that needed to be processed.

  Fire me, please, I was thinking when I only half heard Mr. Salmon say, “and that is why we believe a week's suspension is appropriate...”

  A week?! Suspension? For all the chaos I'd caused? I was almost insulted.

  I sat silently, my mouth half open as Foreman Salmon finished his little speech.

  I almost laughed. They were so feckless, they couldn't even seriously punish me. One week of suspension? For what I had done? I should be fired. I almost told Mr. Salmon so, but managed to hold my tongue.

  When Foreman Salmon finished, I rose from my chair and dropped my clipboard down on the table. Before I did, however, I removed form 24-01 from my back pocket and clipped it to the top of the stack. I don't think Mr. Salmon noticed, and it was not really an act of contriteness. I simply wanted to be rid of it, I realized. It was his form, after all, not mine. With my schematic on the back now erased, I had no more use for it – or for the job that went along with it.

  The trolleys wouldn't be running back to Boot Hill until that evening, so I decided to trek my way home on foot instead of waiting, wallowing in my supposed shame. It would take most of the day, and the trolley might still beat me home. The sun was blazing in the sky, but I set off regardless. By lunchtime, I had cleared the forest of freight containers full of boots that surrounded The Shop and was well out in the open of the scrub when I caught sight of Fluky's truck rumbling up the road towards me. He was kicking up a cloud of dust; he must have been moving fast.

  He didn't slow down until he'd shot right past me, only realizing it was me waving by the side of the road after he was two hundred yards further on. He skidded to a halt, swung the truck around and came rolling up beside me.

  He started yelling before the truck had fully stopped, “Them black-suited fellas!” he yelled across the cab, out the open passenger side window. “They're at Zimmerman's junkyard!”

  “What?” I opened the door and pulled myself wearily into the truck, happy to be off my feet.

  “Them black Cadillacs!” Fluky continued, putting the truck in gear. “Pulled up 'front of the junkyard, ten this morning. I was out, towin' in a wreck, but I seen them when I pulled on back. Dropped my load and hightailed it out here after you. What the hell you doin'? Walkin' home?”

  “I got suspended,” I said.

  “Suspended? What, like in high school? They can do that?”

  “I guess... Is everything out of the workshop at Zimmerman's? Everything having to do with the train?”

  “Yeah, yeah, think so.” Fluky had the truck up to its full speed, hurtling through the scrub.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Hell, I don't know. I didn't know there was gonna be an inspection... How you think they found out about us? Huh?”

  “We don't know they know anything,” I said resolutely.

  “But they-”

  “Deputy Aesop was sniffing around, too. Just 'cause they're suspicious doesn't mean they know anything.”

  Fluky fell quiet and drove. I might have reassured him. I wished I'd reassured myself.

  Fluky slowed the truck down once we hit Boot Hill proper and when we reached the gates of Zimmerman's junkyard, he rolled the old truck slowly past, giving us a good look. The two black cars were there in the yard, but there was no sign of any Concession men out in the open. Fluky kept the truck rolling, pulling past the gate and around the block. I had him pull up and park, killing the engine, so I could consider our options.

  “Ten o'clock, you said?” I asked, craning my neck back, looking at the high fence around the junkyard.

  “Yeah, 'bout then.”

  “Right when I was called in to talk to Salmon...” I said.

  “Yeah,” Fluky agreed thoughtfully. “So?”

  “So, they knew I'd be at The Shop. Where's Mitty?”

  “Hell, how the hell should I know? Fighting the war with his tin solders, probably.”

  “No one's in Pottersville?”

  “No... Oh sh-it! The train!” Fluky reached for the ignition. I grabbed his hand to stop him.

  “No, no. If they knew about Union Station they wouldn't be here at the yard.”

  “But it's all just sittin' there out in the open...”

  “Yeah, and we'd lead them right to it.”

  Fluky relaxed. I let go of his hand.

  “What we gonna do?” Fluky finally asked, looking back with me at the fence of the junkyard.

  “Nothing's changed,” I began. “We've all still got work to do.” Then a horrible thought hit me. “Fluky, where's the freezer coil? Where?!” I almost screamed.

  “At the station!” Fluky said defensively. “All piped up like Li'l Bean instructed.”

  “Oh, thank God!” I sighed in relief. Thank God we'd had the foresight to move the whole operation to Pottersville – thank God that Deputy Aesop had so ham-handedly come snooping around.

  “So, maybe we should lay low, you know? If these black-suits have caught on to our scent...”

  “No,” I said firmly. “If anything, we need to move up the schedule.”

  “But everythin' we need now is out at The Shop.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “We'll make a run tonight.”

  Freed from my responsibilities as a Foreman, I was able to focus my full attention on the imminent departure of The Cordwainer. With the ever present threat of the Concession goons, we worked almost exclusively at night. We took the precaution of no longer driving Fluky's truck up and over C street into Pottersville for all the town to see. Mitty and I started trekking out into the ghost town on foot after dark, and Fluky got into the habit of only driving the wrecking truck the long way around the hillside, where anyone follo
wing him would instantly be obvious.

  On our first excursion – nighttime raid – on The Shop, we went in search of fitting containers for the transportation and storage of our HTP. Mason jugs, this time, would be a dangerous eccentricity. We found exactly what we needed in the motor pool of The Shop: A pair of large, thousand-gallon aluminum tanks that had once, perhaps, had some sort of agricultural role. What purpose they served at The Shop was a point of conjecture, but they would serve our needs very well. We made two runs that night, back and forth to Pottersville. We filled both tanks carefully at the spigot of one of the large mega-gauge H2O2 tankers, and hauled them back to the station.

  It took two more nights and two more trips hauling one of the tanks full of peroxide back and forth between The Shop and the other tank we had mounted to the nose of the engine car of The Cordwainer. In between, by the light of the day, I ran our fractional crystallization rig to purify the peroxide from 30 percent to 90 percent. How it worked, I never really understood, but it required a pair of coaxial copper coils and precipitated large quantities of freezing cold water. Sophie had instructed that a small amount of ammonia be added to the purified peroxide to stabilize it before we added it to the tank, and I did this dutifully with each batch.

  By Friday evening of that week, The Cordwainer's fuel tank was full. I tested its pH and it came out as highly acidic. This I assumed meant we were right in the neighborhood of high test. I planned to wait for Sophie to get her final approval, but altogether I was feeling well prepared.

  With our fuel runs complete, our night raids from there on out concentrated on filling our freight cars. We uncoupled each car in turn, hauled it out in its entirety and loaded it up directly from the cargo containers abandoned out in the scrub. The boots were in relatively good condition, even in the containers that looked like they'd been out in the open air for years. On that Saturday night we were able to fill two whole containers, and Sunday we filled up the third.

  When Monday rolled around again, we had our cargo of boots fully loaded into The Cordwainer; her fuel tank sat filled to the brim. All we had left on our agenda was for Sophie to look over Fluky's handiwork and the initial tests of her turbine engine. Since we had moved the whole operation out to Pottersville, Sophie had been mostly absent from the work site. Fluky felt that he'd followed Sophie's instructions to the letter, and I'd looked over the whole engine myself with a keen eye, but we all felt it fell to Sophie to drop the switch the first time The Cordwainer's engine turned over. It was her engine, after all.

  That Monday evening I walked back into Boot Hill to pay her a visit. I'd taken to spending my nights in Pottersville. I hadn't wanted to go home and face my father after the suspension. I was mostly working nights, sleeping days, with all our evening burglaries. It was refreshing to return to Boot Hill on a lazy summer evening with no nefarious aims in mind. The front doors of all the small, neat bungalows sat open and people had extended their living rooms out into their front yards. There was a whole street fair feel to summer evenings in Boot Hill, with neighbors casually chatting and children playing in the streets. With all the anxiety of Mitty's Plan, with all the trouble out at The Shop, I'd forgotten about that side of Boot Hill – the Boot Hill I'd grown up in. Poor and hard set upon people might be, but it had always been a great place to live.

  I knocked on my sister's kitchen door. She was working at the stove in an apron and turned to look at me through the glass. She let me in with a finger pressed to her lips and moved to close the connecting door between the kitchen and the living room.

  “Now's not a good time, Andy,” she said, tending to her cooking.

  “She's ready,” I said, sitting down at the kitchen table.

  “What's ready?”

  “The Cordwainer.”

  “The what-” and then she remembered, “Your damn train?”

  “It's ready, in Pottersville, at the old Union Station. We're ready to test the engine. We all thought, since it was your design, that you should have the honor.”

  “You'll need to process some peroxide before we can test it,” she said, taking something off the heat.

  “All done,” I said happily. “I got suspended at work, I've had some time.”

  “How much have you processed?” she asked.

  “A thousand gallons,” I said with pride.

  “A thousand?”

  “Enough to get us to Seattle.”

  “Are you insane?” she turned to me, wiping her hands on her apron. “It was a fun project and all, but you can't be serious?”

  “Serious?” I was confused.

  “Playing Rockefeller with your idiot chums is one thing – stock options and profit sharing – but you don't actually think you can get across the mountains in that thing, do you?” She tried to laugh but nothing emerged.

  I opened my mouth and closed it again. I was speechless. It was Sophie, my surrogate mother, talking down to me. I felt like a child. “Did you think this was all a game?” I eventually said.

  “Build the engine just to build it, you said. I believed that. But to actually risk your life trying to get across the mountains with a load of old, stupid boots. Now, that's just foolish.”

  “But in the City,” I began, “a pair of boots can sell for-”

  Sophie snapped at me, suddenly angry, “Money! That's all you ignorant, selfish children care about! To make a buck. The other two, I can forgive it, they know no better, but you, Andrew, I'm ashamed. I thought you were raised better than that!”

  “What's wrong with making a buck?” I asked, in all honesty.

  “What's wrong?” Sophie almost choked on her indignation. “With all the problems this country is facing, Andrew, and you want to know what's wrong with making a buck? It's crooks like you who got us into this mess. Look at this,” she opened the pan she had been cooking with, showing the brown, gelatinous goo she'd prepared. “That is supposed to be food! That is what I have to feed my husband this evening. People are going hungry, Andrew. Not the poor, not the idle, but hardworking, everyday people are short on food. And you ask what's wrong with making a buck? You selfish little snot!”

  “But we made an engine that produces no carbon,” I tried to defend. “Don't you see the potential in that, Sophie? If it can carry shoes it could carry food.”

  “Exactly!” she thrust a finger at me. Her eyes looked insane. “I build you an engine and do you use it for the betterment of anyone? No! You only think of getting rich – just you. You disgust me, Andrew. You and those two dummy friends of yours.”

  Sophie turned back to the stove. I reached for the door. I had almost reached it when I thought better of it. “Isn't Kennedy always telling us we're supposed to be a Nation of Big Ideas? Well, what idea is bigger than this one?”

  “Big ideas to help people, Andy, not line your own pockets!” Sophie said, her back still to me.

  “But lining our pockets is the idea, Sophie!” I fired, stepping back away from the door. “The train – the engine – that was always the point. The reason to do it. If people thought of this sort of stuff out of the goodness of their hearts, don't you think they would? The idea, Sophie, the motivation is everything.”

  Sophie turned away from the stove and looked at me, scolding me with her eyes.

  “And nothing motivates better than a chance at improving your lot in life. Back a man into a corner and don't give him an out and he's a dangerous thing. But give him some room to move, let him explore and there's no telling what he'll achieve. I'm sorry, but I was never cut out to work at The Shop, Sophie, and you weren't either. That you could design that engine, that we – together – could build it. That's something, Sophie. Don't we deserve to see the fruits of our labor? Reap some reward? If we can build it, if we're smart enough, don't we have some sort of right?”

  Sophie was quiet, staring at me, unemotional. As always, when she was quiet it scared me, just like Dad. Yelling, screaming I could handle, but silence...

  Then I realized
what she had done.

  Deputy Aesop, the Concession goons, sniffing around Zimmerman's junkyard. She'd sent them. She'd tipped them off to Mitty's Plan. And here I'd just told her where The Cordwainer was, where we had moved it to. She'd ratted us out. Because she disapproved of our motives, she'd sold us out to the authorities. There was no look of shame on her face, no guilt. She looked at me silently, with still, cold eyes.

  “No, no you didn't...” I said, the horror rising in me.

  “The rules apply to us all equally, Andrew,” she said, slowly shaking her head. “None of us are above the law.”

  “But what are we doing that's wrong?” I asked, slowly moving towards the door.

  “You need to think of others before yourself, Andrew,” she said. “If we all went around just looking out for number one...”

  “But, but you're my sister...” I tried, backing up.

  “If you haven't been doing anything wrong, Andy, then there's nothing to fear,” Sophie said. She was growing visibly smaller in my eyes, receding away from me. I reached back and unlatched the door, swinging in open.

  “But you built the engine, Sophie. It's your engine.”

  “Exactly,” she said coldly. “And I will see my engine used as I see fit.”

  But I had turned on my heels and I was sprinting away; around my sister's small, concrete bungalow and down the street. I sprinted all the way to C Street and along it, up the hill towards Mitty's house.

  It felt like my lungs were about to explode by the time I was knocking on the makeshift, plywood back door.