The Cordwainer

  Chapter Five

  The Shop

  I woke up the next morning on the porch swing of my father's house. Why I hadn't bothered to climb into my own bed, I couldn't remember. What had happened the night before after the twenty minutes we'd spent waiting for the behemoth to clear the road was a blur. I remember more drinks, someone's home. And I remembered Fluky hitting a fire hydrant in the truck as he was driving me home. But the details where hazy. At least I was alive, and I'd slept a few hours. The sun was up as I pulled myself vertical in the porch swing. That was a mistake. Instantly, the contents of my stomach revolted to the sudden movement, and came exploding forth. I managed to throw up over the edge of the porch, into the geranium beds.

  The front door swung slowly open.

  When I came up for air I saw Dad standing in the doorway, coffee cup in hand. He didn't look mad, he didn't look happy. He looked at me over the rim of his cup and took a sip.

  “Late night?” He finally said.

  I knew he was disappointed in me. I was disappointed in me, now that my brain was starting to function again. He turned on his heels and stepped back, silently into the shadows of the house. I was in trouble. Yelling, shouting, I knew where I stood, but when my dad got silent...

  I pulled myself up to standing and my knees almost buckled under me. All I wanted to do was head for my bed, inside the house there, through the living room and right at the hall; but my dad was making his slow way towards the kitchen. I dizzily followed. I'd have to take my lumps, whatever they'd be, before I could collapse into the welcoming embrace of my soft bed. In the kitchen, my dad took a seat at the table. I dropped down into the chair across from him, facing my breakfast bowl, laid out ready for me. A box of Tom Mixx cereal – the one with the cowboy on the box – and a carton of reconstituted milk sat between my father and me. A carton of milk approximately the same size and design as the type McTavish came in. My stomach turned.

  “Andy...” my father began with a sigh, then stopped, adjusting his horn-rimmed glasses. I couldn't look up from the box of Tom Mixx; the room was starting to swirl.

  We sat there in silence as the seconds ticked difficultly by, my dad slowly shaking his head and looking down into his black coffee.

  “Tomorrow morning...” he began again.

  “I know,” I interrupted.

  “Just look at your jacket...”

  I looked down at the beer-stained, torn hemp of my previously new coat. “Sorry,” was all I could say.

  “You'll have to borrow an old one of mine.” He sipped at his cup. “You're twenty-two years old, Andrew. Do I have to watch you...”

  “No,” I returned my gaze to the box of Tom Mixx cereal – the one with the cowboy on the box. My vision was getting blurry. “I'm going to bed now,” I announced.

  “I just, Andy...” my dad added as I pulled myself up out of my chair. “People are going to look up to you now... At the Shop... You're a Foreman, that commands a certain amount of... respect...”

  I didn't answer, I just used the table for support and worked my way across the kitchen and back out into the hall. I found the door to my room, closed it behind me, and fell face first, on top of the covers, onto my bed.

  This was how I found myself when I awoke an indeterminate amount of time later that day. The sun hung low in the west over the mountains outside my window. It must have been late, I must have slept the day away. Somewhere in the house the phone was ringing. I pulled myself painfully off my bed, the swirling feeling in my head replaced with a thumping pain. I staggered out into the hall, reaching clumsily for the shrill receiver, answering it only to silence the agonizing ringing in my ears.

  “Hello?” I asked.

  “So, when do we begin?” the voice on the other end asked with not so much as a greeting or prologue.

  “What?” was all I could manage.

  “The Plan, Beanie, the Plan...” It was Mitty.

  “What? What plan?” I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

  “For the boots! Across the mountains, to the Big City. Last night, I thought we were in agreement.”

  “Agreement? Boots? Plan? What?” It was too early – or too late, or my head thumped far too hard from the inside. I wasn't getting it. What had I agreed to?

  “You and me, simpatico, concerning my plan...” Obviously I was meant to understand what Mitty was saying. “I've been trying to call you all day!”

  “I've been sleeping it off,” I admitted, then added: “Ain't you hungover, Mitty?”

  “Of course!” Mitty replied dismissively, “but no simple headache is going to dampen my enthusiasm. We have a rare opportunity here, Beanie, a plan of singular ingenuity...”

  “What are we talking about again?” I was remembering some talk about the shortages and people laughing at me.

  “The Plan, Beanie, the Plan...”

  And then it came back to me like a flood.

  I dropped the receiver from some height back onto its cradle, letting it clatter and rock back to rest. The phone again began to ring when I was halfway back to my room. I closed my bedroom door firmly behind me, ignoring it. I returned to bed, this time undressing and climbing under the covers, and let the faint shrill of the phone ring on in the distance.

  Two minutes and I was back asleep again, with the phone ringing in my dreams. Mitty had something important to tell me in the dream, but I couldn't understand his muffled voice on the other end of the line. Eventually, I was forced to hang up on Mitty in the dream, only to realize I was standing in the corridor of the High School, naked and late for a test.

  Monday morning came far too rapidly, and I was still suffering from the aftereffects of my hangover as I pulled on one of my father's old sport coats and ate a breakfast of Tom Mixx cereal – the one with the cowboy on the box – at the kitchen table with my father. He spared me any new lectures on my behavior and improved social status, and I ate breakfast in silence, as Dad sipped away at his coffee.

  Twenty minutes later, we were at the end of our street at the corner of Roosevelt waiting on the trolley. That was when the nerves really began to set in. We had our lunch pails with bologna sandwiches and thermoses of coffee. A dozen or so other Shop workers were also waiting at the corner, similarly equipped.

  It was my first day of work. I realized I was schlepping to work like every other Joe. No one at the corner paid me a second glance. I was almost invisible. There were terse “good mornings” to my father, but no one paid me any heed. In the old sport coat and slacks I looked like a younger carbon copy of my dad. All eyes looked up Roosevelt for the trolley, and after a few minutes I found my stare also trained down the street in unconscious sympathy. Presently, the trolley rumbled into view, making stops at each corner down Roosevelt to load up on workers. When our turn came, we shuffled aboard to find the trolley already packed with people. There was standing room only and we hung onto the hemp straps attached to the ceiling as the trolley grumbled back to life.

  It was a forty minute ride out to The Shop on the very outskirts of town, where the concrete bungalows of Boot Hill give away to the dusty scrub. The closer to the factory the trolley rolled the more frequent the sight of a lone shipping container off to the side of the road became. At first the crates were hardly noticeable, seemingly abandoned and forgotten in the sand. But by the time we were within a mile of The Shop the containers were neatly stacked shoulder to shoulder and two high like valley walls beside us.

  It was an impressive sight to see the productive power of The Shop expressed in such physical terms. I could only guess how many years of back stock the shipping containers represented. But the simple fact that The Shop made a hell of a lot of boots at a hell of a clip couldn't be contradicted. That the system fell down so impressively beyond the factory doors was a tragedy of epic proportions. It was obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes that Boot Hill had no trouble producing enough boots to shod the nation. That people were going barefoot in so many towns... Boot Hill couldn't be fa
ulted.

  Of course, determining who was to blame for the crippling shortages that were gripping the nation was a harder game to play. There were plenty of candidates to point the finger at: The Concession, with its mega-gauge monopoly on freight; the government back in Washington with its bureaucratic micromanaging of the people's lives cradle to grave; the vicious black-market goons, stealing everything that wasn't bolted down and selling it back the next day for profit. But in any serious critique of how America's fortunes had swerved so outrageously off the tracks, blame had to eventually fall squarely at the feet of the American people.

  Perhaps not, candidly, with current Americans, suffering under the weight of a barely functioning nation; but past generations, who'd raped and ravished the land and the air with little idea of the implications or the longterm damage they were causing. The blame, if truth be told, had to fall on the heads of people long since dead and gone; though those still living had to live with the consequences, pay the price. But as a nation, we were the victims of our own excess, squandered a hundred years before I was even born.

  The rapid overheating of the planet because of human production of greenhouse gases was, by far, the worst offender. The old coal-burning factories; the automobiles that millions of Americans used to own and drive; the vast deforestation of the planet for construction materials and home heating had all taken an irreversible toll on the fragile planet. If it hadn't been for the global droughts of '27 and '28, the subsequent market crash, and the birth of the New Deal, who knows what sort of damage the planet would have suffered. But luckily, progressive politics and serious respect for hard science came to power in America with the election of FDR in 1932. He set about reorganizing the nation around a green agenda, focusing on the symbiotic issues of rampant poverty and global overheating. The overheating of the Planet Earth was slowed, but the austerity measures required to achieve it...

  And forty years later the effects were still being felt. The Concession, so long hindered by stringent carbon caps on its behemoth locomotives, attempted to supply a nation drowning in demand. But to run a company under such conditions, to even attempt to stay profitable, required extensive subsidies and market protections from the government. The Concession had quickly become the last operating railroad in the continental United States – truly the Government Concession of transportation in America. Despite its best efforts – its truly epic attempts to get a handle on the spiraling U.S. economy – the shortages worsened until the nation had reached the chronic conditions that so epitomized that summer of 1973, when I started on my first day of work at The Shop.

  The brakes squealed and the trolley came to a rest before the factory gates. We shuffled off as we shuffled on: orderly and in no particular rush. Other electric trolleys from other corners of town were arriving along their branch lines, disgorging workers appropriate in class to the neighborhood it serviced. Trolleys from the wrong side of the tracks brought Class C workers: assembly line cutters and renders and dyers. From the outer, but more affluent, downtown neighborhoods the trolleys brought Class B workers, mostly women; the stitchers and finishers and the low-level office staff. It was only from the central, mainline trolleys that the Class A workers like myself – foremen, accountants and managers – arrived. Only the Class A workers were wearing shirts and ties, the lower ranks dressed in blue-dyed hemp work clothes that could have passed for denim. Everyone made their way through the factory gates and across the small work yard toward The Shop itself.

  I followed my father in a state of shocked amazement. The sheer size of The Shop was intimidating. Numerous buildings of various eras and various sizes clustered around the work yard. I remember my father telling me that The Shop had once been a munitions plant back in the war, when weapons production had been moved across the mountains to escape Japanese bombing. The core of that munitions factory was still there, now many times expanded upon. Annexes and processing wings and, in the late 60s, a whole new assembly line building. The Shop had increased output 150 percent since 1958, my father was proud to tell anyone and everyone who would listen. He felt a personal sense of satisfaction in that fact, felt at least a little personally responsible for the success. My dad made straight across the yard for a small, single-story building off to the right. I tried to keep up, but lagged behind as I absorbed the sheer scale of everything around me.

  We stepped through a small door to a round of thunderous applause.

  I was taken aback, curious about what I had done to merit such adulation, when I realized that no one was actually applauding me. The small room, which I'd later come to learn was the Foreman break room, was filled to the gills with people. There was a small raised platform at the far end of the room on which two men – one younger, laughing; one older, looking sheepish – were standing.

  As the applause died down, the younger one continued: “Now, I know we're all going to miss Barry. I know he's been a Shop favorite, particularly with the girls in the typing pool.” Laughter. “But retirement comes to us all, and sooner than many of us expect.”

  My father was sliding his lunch pail into a small cubbyhole off to the left of the door with “David Rice” written on tape in black pen just above it. He removed his jacket and hung it up in the cubbyhole, all the while giving his full attention to the man talking on stage. He laughed on cue with everyone else and stepped in amongst the crowd when he'd stripped down to his shirt sleeves.

  I hesitated on what to do. I looked down the row of cubbies but could find none that was labeled with my name. I held my lunch self-consciously in my hand and realized that I was the only person of at least two hundred who was wearing a coat. The protocol was obviously that you wore a jacket to work but removed it the second you stepped through the door. It was little wonder that there was still so much wear left in my dad's old coat. But there was nowhere to hang my jacket and I felt foolishly out of place. I had to fight back the feeling that I should bolt from the room and run the whole ten miles back to town. I was acting like a kid and for the first time in my life I was in a place exclusively the domain of adults. I had to act my age, I realized, unsure of exactly how to inconspicuously hold my lunch pail.

  “Now, fifty might not seem that old to some,” the young man was saying.

  “Put him out of his misery!” someone yelled from the floor to universal chuckles.

  The man continued, “...but twenty-five long years of loyal service here at The Shop is deserving of its reward. And today we're happy to send Barry here off to, hopefully, many happy years of retirement, filled with the satisfaction that he is leaving behind a better, more productive factory from his years of service; and a happier, more productive workforce from his inspiration.”

  There was applause again. The sheepish man up on the stage looked like he was welling up with tears – happy and sad.

  “So we'd like to present you,” the younger man continued again, “with this watch, in recognition of your long service.” He held up a small box with something gold inside. The room erupted again in applause, this time mixed with whistles and cheers. The sheepish man on the stage took the small box and shook hands with the young man vigorously. Then, as spontaneously as the applause had begun, it ended, and a hundred minor conversations began simultaneously.

  The sheepish man up on the platform, Barry, looked sad and alone.

  The crowd was already beginning to disperse as Barry stepped down off the platform. The man who had presented the watch had already vanished and no one was paying Barry any attention as he moved through the crowd. He was turning over the small box in his hands as he crossed the break room, fidgeting with the lid.

  He came straight across the room and right up to me.

  “Andrew Rice?” he said, holding out a hand. I attempted to raise a hand to take his but my lunch pail was still in it. I had to transfer the pail to my left hand before I could shake his.

  “Yes, yes,” I stammered.

  “Congratulations,” he said, looking everyw
here but at me in the eye. “First day of work, I know it can be intimidating, but you'll get the hang of it soon enough. Here.” He pushed by me, lifted a jacket out of a cubbyhole and said, “This will be yours.” He reached up and pulled off a length of tape that had “Barry Winters” written on it in pen. He pulled on his coat and shook my hand again. “Good luck, keep your nose clean. Pay attention to your father. He practically runs this place, so if you're anything like him...” He was still shaking my hand. The handshake had been going on uncomfortably long. He pulled his hand away self-consciously and wiped it off on his pants. “Well, anyway. Good luck.” He spun on his heel and headed for the door.

  Suddenly, somehow, I felt like I'd jumped into somebody's grave.

  I put my lunch pail into the cubbyhole and removed my coat. I was hanging it up when I noticed a small black box that Barry had set on the shelf inside the cubby. I opened it up and looked at the small, gold watch. Barry's parting gift, ticking away telling me the time was 9:15.

  I contemplated running after Barry, but he was already out of sight. My father's voice came from behind me, telling me it was time to get to work. I closed the lid of the small black box and began to return it to Barry's cubby – my cubby. Then I stopped, reopened the box and slipped the gold watch onto my wrist. It seemed a shame to waste it, even for a day, and I tightened the strap in place and checked the time. My father's voice came again from across the room and I turned, reporting to my father for duty.