As a Thief in the Night (34 page)

The inside of a foundry looks something like an ill begotten hybrid of the industrial world's hell, and a furnace room churning out smoke and heat in the bowels of a late nineteenth century steamship.
  Everything is black and covered in ash.  The molten metal sends up burning fireflies into the air around huge crucibles, machines, and transport vessels.  Workers wear heavy, silver, full-bodied protective suits that one would expect to see worn when an alien planet is being explored, or when the damage of a nuclear accident is being surveyed. Men move around with long handled tools and pour out rivers of hot flowing metal that look like they should only be handled by the shades of Hades. Forklifts drive through plumes of smoke and heavy cranes on tracks line the high, blackened roof.

Anyone who has worked in a factory that employs students in the summer knows what kind of work they get.
  Ezra and Nick got the hottest, nastiest, biggest pain in the ass jobs their foremen could find. The temperatures in the foundry were so hot that work time was split into twenty-minute shifts. For the first twenty you poured the fiery liquid and sweated as you had never sweated in your life, for the next twenty you retreated to a break room where you drank as much water as you could hold.

For the first couple of weeks he worried about his weight. He was working out every day and trying to add muscle and mass for the fall, but how could he do that with sweat pouring off him all day? On the way home they stopped at a gym in Tecumseh to lift weights. It was hard and when he came home he was bitter that his responsibilities left him without time or energy to read and write. The long hot days went by. The nights and moons drifted past and touched his sleep.

One morning, at the beginning of August, something very strange happened at the foundry. Apparently, as some of the widely differing incident reports read, metal for a cylinder block, which is an engine's heart, had been poured into a mould and left to cool and harden.  There was nothing special about this, of course, because it was done several times a day. What made this particular cylinder block unusual though, was that when it was removed from the mould the man removing it discovered that it had hardened into what appeared to be gold. This caused a big stir in that area of the foundry, work stopped, and all the men gathered round to see what looked like a very unlikely miracle. The foreman, seeing all this happen, called the floor manager who came out and declared that all work needed to stop until the matter was investigated fully. More of the metal could be corrupted (that was the word he used), and if this was another prank, the culprit had to be identified before he did any more damage to production.  The cylinder block was quickly covered and moved away to the management offices. 

Nick and Ezra were working in a different part of the plant and were sent outside without knowing what had happened. Glad for the respite from the heat, whatever the cause, they each took a couple of bottles of water and filed outside with everyone else.
 

They walked out through the parking lot and took a seat on the low wall by the road. Cars sped by on the busy street in front of them. They drank their water and hoped that whatever the problem was wouldn't be solved soon. Yvonne, a sixty-year-old French Canadian who drove one of the forklifts and who always smelled of hard liquor, pulled over in his truck to the side of the road. He was going home.

"Hey now, you rookies get back to work," he slurred, and flicked the butt of his cigarette at them.

"Where do you think you're going, Yvonne?" Nick asked, knocking the butt away.

"Whatcha mean?  Home."

"But you're on our shift."

"Shift's over."

Nick looked at his watch. "We've still got six hours."

"Not me. Maybe you do, company man. Ha, ha!"

"You won't catch hell?" Ezra asked.

"Ah! Come on now," the old man waved him off.

"Why did they send us out?"

"You never heard then?"

"No."

"One of the cylinder blocks came out gold!"

"Bullshit!" Ezra said.

"Saw it myself. It's a miracle!"

"How many drinks did you have before work this morning Yvonne?" Nick asked.

"Ha, ha! Maybe that's it after all. But to hell with all this, I'm goin' home to my wife." He pulled away fast. 

"Crazy old fucker," Nick said, and spit a mouthful of water onto the hot sidewalk.

"But I like him just the same," said Ezra.

Nick spewed out another stream of water, trying to better the distance of his last one. They were quiet for a moment and looked back to see if any of the other men were headed back to work. A row of them sat in the shade that the west wall provided, others sat at picnic tables on the grass and smoked. "I've got to stop spending money," Nick broke in as if he were giving voice to what he'd been thinking. "The cash here is great, but I've been going through it faster than ever." He stopped to take another drink. "How much have you saved for school, Ez?"

"Fifteen hundred."

"That's pretty good. How much do you need?"

"Tuition is twenty-eight hundred for both semesters." Ezra paused and looked across the street. "But it doesn't matter anyway."

"Yeah, I suppose you'll need loans no matter what."

"I'm not taking any loans."

"Then how will you swing it?"

"I'm not going to university, Nick."

"What are you talking about?"

"I've decided not to go to Laurier."

"But that's what you've been planning for. I thought you wanted to become a writer."

"I don't think they can teach me to write in school."

"So who can?"

"At the beginning of September I'm going to take the money I've saved and buy a car."

"For what?"

"I'm going to drive out to Northern California."

"What are you going to do out there?"

"Take a job at one of the vineyards, study tragedy, camp at Big Sur."

"Tragedy?" Nick asked, as if it didn't belong with the other two.

"Yeah. I want to read all the great tragedies..." He paused. "I have a suspicion about them."

"What's that?"

"That they're not
really
tragic."

"Ez, I got news for you. Clawing out your own eyes and wandering around blind and tortured is tragic. What else could it be?"

"A gateway into the mystery."

"I'm your best friend, Ezra, and I'm with you no matter what, but I've got to tell you that from where I'm sitting this all sounds pretty messed up. I mean, what about another school? I heard Barry Towfolow is going to play at Western."

"Fuck Western."

"But what about football? Haven't you already committed to the coach at Laurier?
  They're expecting you to be there on the first day of camp. And what are you going to say to your aunt and uncle?"

"Football is always going to be there."

"You made a commitment to those people though."

"Maybe duty is the most dangerous of our temptations."

"Jesus, are you sure all this is really you, Ezra?"

"No, but I'm going to find out. And I'll be finding out for myself, on my own terms."

Distant voices drew their attention. The men were heading back into the foundry. Ezra and Nick hopped off the wall and started walking back towards the factory doors together. "Don't get me wrong," Ezra said after it had been quiet for a minute, "I might still come back and be an athlete."

"When?

"When my philosophy has become athletic."

"Athletic?"

"A philosophy of the body."

No one ever found out if the base metal inside the foundry had in fact turned to gold. For some it was an impossibility, a magician's joke. However, one young man, and a few of the others, perhaps those men who had once been solitary children, worked on one long grueling day after another with the unspoken hope that the miracle might be repeated in their presence. They believed in a day unlike all others, a day when the common mould the world tries so hard to bind us with, and within which we imprison ourselves, would be broken with the hammer of truth reborn, when a new song could be sung from an unchained heart. If something captures the imagination it
is
truth.

As above so below.
As within so without.