Memorial Bridge (2 page)

Cattle, sheep and hogs stymied in narrow pens with too little room, pressed by more and more stock, the air charged with ever mounting animal anxiety. Yes, Dillon knew what it meant. He was a city boy, but he'd grown up in the foul shadow of this place, and he knew what its nightmares were. If the mass of cattle, sheep and hogs panicked in their pens, there was no place for them to bolt to. Yet the stampede impulse was still a danger, a greater one, they said, inside the yards than on the open plain. A crazed but penned-up herd would simply maul itself, hogs butting at walls, cattle tearing into each other with their horns, slamming bone against bone, breaking heads, stomping the fallen, a fury unleashed but leashed still by the very pens and therefore all the more furious. Once the animals were seized by that frenzy, nothing would relieve it until they were all dead. Uselessly, absurdly, cruelly dead. And if the frenzy struck, for as long as it lasted the animals would send up a rough piercing squeal of terror that would carry out across Chicago. Dillon himself had heard that sound once years before when a fire had set the animals off. It had so chilled him—he was twelve years old—that he'd vowed never to work in the stockyards, that awful place, that hell. When later he'd found that it was to be a job there or nowhere, he'd swallowed his qualm and put in for steam so that he would have less to do with the animals.

The pipefitters were not kings of the place, or even princes. The kings were knifemen; the princes were livestock handlers and the buyers. By most definitions the pipefitters weren't ranked with the stockyard royalty at all, but they were organized nevertheless according to their own rigid caste, and they regarded themselves—whatever the shit-kickers or cutters said—as an elite. Jack Hanley had accepted Dillon into it because he'd needed a helper at the time, and because Dillon was fresh out of the seminary where he'd been friends with Hanley's nephew.

That was six years ago. By now Hanley had taught Dillon damn near everything he knew, and though the older man would never have admitted it, their relationship had in fact subtly changed. Dillon was a savvy worker, but he was more than that. He had an agile, strong body
and an even more agile brain. Mostly the job of steamfitters was to solve the incessant problems of three dozen burdened, aging boiler systems which generated not only steam heat for the huge buildings but also heat essential to the manufacture of margarine, lard, dressed beef and tinned hams. Finding leaks, repairing cisterns, sealing joints, rerouting pipes, maintaining huge cookers and hooking up new water lines to those already in place all involved a feel for systems you could never fully see. Dillon could picture how the steam works ran in the Swift packinghouses better than the old-timers who'd helped lay them out. The old-timers had of course been better fitters than draftsmen, and the drawings they left behind were often useless even to the men, like Hanley, who had learned directly from them. So Hanley, in drawing
his
rigs, as in plumbing his holes and applying his sealers, had come to depend as much on young Dillon's intuition as on his own memory of what some old fool had taught him back near the turn of the century. Hanley was grateful that it suited Dillon to stay on his slate, though Dillon could have had a slate of his own for a long time now. He had a fierce ambition but, lucky for Hanley, it had nothing to do with the hierarchy of Swift's plumbery.

But that didn't mean Dillon couldn't understand why all stockyarders, even plumbers, lived in dread of a panicked herd. The herd's order was the goal toward which all the other levels of order in the yards were directed—the physical order of the grid layout, the political order that elevated handlers, the ceremonies of stately animal procession through the chutes behind the Judas cow. And the main function of all that order was to keep the animal victims blind to the truth of what awaited them. And wasn't that semblance of order, in turn, how the men kept
themselves
blind to what the yards were doing, day in and day out, to them?

"Yes, Jack, I know what it means if the animals snap. But that's the handlers' problem. A dead killing line is a knifeman's problem. Or it's the top boss's problem; tell Moran to call Mr. Swift." Dillon had put his clean shirt on and now began to button it. "We're pipefitters, Jack. Remember? Humble pipefitters."

"It's pipes that caused the problem. Blood pipes."

"Blood pipes! Jack, blood pipes are the trap cleaners' job, not ours." Trap cleaning was the scum job of scum jobs.

"It's not the traps. They've checked the traps. Blood backed up a foot
deep in
all
the killing rooms. No single trap blocks that much blood. The amount of it is what shut the lines down. Blood is over their boots down there."

Dillon studied Hanley's soft face. The familiar stale odor of alcohol poured off his breath. His rheumy eyes didn't move from Dillon's. The plea Dillon saw in them made him uncomfortable. "Jack, I've got to get downtown. I have to be there by five."

"Moran's the one who called me. He's waiting for us."

"Why is Moran on it?"

"The whole fucking line is down. Nothing's moving anywhere! Of course the boss would be on it. They expect the cows and hogs to break out any time. And the boys are coming out from State Street. Moran wants the fix before they get here. They're on him, and he's on me."

"And you're on me."

"We have to figure which pipe is clogged."

"Did they check the tanks? Are the holding tanks full up? That would do it."

"Moran must have checked the tanks first. He says it has to be the pipes. Jesus, Mary and Joseph, there are probably fifty miles of cast-iron pipe—"

"Then it's a box basin, Jack."

"What?"

"If the runoff is backed up everywhere, and if the tanks aren't full. A clogged pipe by itself wouldn't do it. If it was one lousy pipe, the flow would only reverse as far as the nearest junction and find another way to run. You'd get backup in one section, maybe two, but not everywhere. But if the downpipe of the box is fouled, it backs up equally through all four feeder pipes, and then you get tankage all over the place."

"But the downpipe, that's three feet across! What could clog a downpipe?"

"How many box basins are there under the house?"

"Four."

"And which one is closest to the lines?"

"There's one at the pickle rooms."

Dillon took his shirt off. For a moment he stared at Hanley, who touched a hand to his own bristly cheek. Dillon saw his fingers shake. Dillon wanted to say, Jack, it's not that complicated. If you'd thought about it for a minute instead of running to me, you could be there already, cleaning the thing.

Dillon faced away to reach into his locker for his rank overalls. How he hated them and how he hated this place and how he hated, for that instant, the pull of his own unexpressed affection for this dumb bastard. He glanced at his watch where it lay on the top shelf of his locker. Still with his back to Hanley, pulling on his work clothes once again, he said, "I'll get you started, Jack. But I can't see it through. I've
got
to get downtown by five."

"You said that."

"I just want you to know I mean it." Dillon braced himself. It had been a while since Jack had given him shit about school, but he sensed it coming now. Hanley wanted Sean Dillon holding his wrenches forever.

But Hanley said simply, "I appreciate it." And then he moved away.

When, after dressing, he turned to look for Jack, all he saw were the other fellows who'd drifted in from the shower room. They were at their lockers, too weary to talk to each other, too indifferent. They showed no sign of the emotional lift Dillon felt at the end of every shift. Of course Dillon rarely showed any sign of such a feeling either; around the stockyards he was as expressionless as any of them. The Stone Gate, he'd often thought, turned men who entered it to stone, like Eddie Quinn there, sitting motionless on his bench, his towel across his middle, apparently unable even to reach for his clothes. Beyond him Pat Riordan was picking his fingernails with a skinner's knife, as if he were ready to turn his skill against his own parts, to carve the stench from his skin.

Jack Hanley was at his own locker. Dillon watched as Hanley pulled furtively on a bottle of hoochinoo. Like a lot of yarders, maybe most of them, Jack needed more than a double shot at the tavern on the way in and another on the way out. The rotgut got him through his shift, but the rotgut was also why Jack was less and less able to remember on his own which way the pipe screws ran. As he watched Hanley drink, Dillon fixed on the familiar tattoo on the back of Hanley's hand, what Dillon knew to be a faded Celtic cross with a lily sprouting from its base. Years ago members of the stockyards branch of the Ancient Order of Hibernians had made the mark a sign of membership until the priest from St. Gabriel's had condemned tattoos as self-mutilation. Dillon had often fixed his gaze upon the gaudy cross while Jack used that hand to apply his wrenches. An image of the resurrection, with its lily, yet the thing always seemed full of grief to Dillon.

When Hanley had wiped his mouth, returned the bottle to its shelf and
closed his locker, he faced Dillon from across the room, ignoring the others, and he intoned, "Praised be His Holy Name." Even at that distance Dillon was struck by how bright Hanley's eyes had gotten with the sudden jolt of alcohol, and he saw his partner for an instant as one of the big-eyed animals outside, holding off panic while waiting in the crush of the pens for what it thinks will be release.

Hanley left the changing room. When Dillon caught up with him in the dingy corridor he was at the. phone. "Give me Mr. Moran," he was saying. He looked back at Dillon, raised a clenched fist and grinned. A moment later he leaned into the mouthpiece again, turning away from Dillon, his voice excited and youthful. "Mr. Moran, I think I've got it figured. Forget the traps. Forget reaming the pipes. If the jam was one pipe, we wouldn't have backup everywhere. It's got to be a box basin, Mr. Moran ... Yes, sir. Thems where the several horizontals meet the whatcha-call downpipe. That's what runs to the cookers—" Hanley stopped abruptly and swung back to look at Sean. Alarm showed on his face, and a question.

Dillon took his arm and whispered, "Tell him you'll check out the pickle room box. Tell him to get his fellows to the other ones. Tell him where they are." Hanley did so and then, dismissed, hung up.

Moments later the pair of them pounded down the dimly lit stairs to the long low corridor that led to the pickle rooms where, in great foul vats of steaming brine, countless slabs of hind-cut beef were soaking. Dillon walked behind Hanley carrying the cumbersome wooden toolbox. Usually, on his way to a job, he liked to picture what they would find, but now his mind was blank. He knew that if he was right, they were about to open the lid on a car-sized pit full of blood, but he couldn't imagine it.

They came to the cast-iron disk on the floor.

Without a word from either, Hanley put his hand out and Dillon slapped a foot-long crowbar into his palm. With one swift jerk of the rod Hanley had the heavy cover open, and he expertly pried it up with a flip so that it twirled for a moment like a coin, then fell clear. The stink blasted out, pushing them back, the odor of death, a fetid tomb.

Dillon tied his soiled handkerchief around his face.

Hanley pinched his nose and craned over the hole. "Boy, oh boy, give me the light, Sean, will you?"

Dillon slapped the flashlight into his partner's hand. When the beam
of light hit the hole, they saw what seemed to be its floor, a gleaming dark asphalt surface only a foot below the lip of the basin. But it wasn't the floor; it wasn't asphalt. The utter lack of movement—no ripples, no bubbles—made the liquid look solid. They both knew at once that this was it, but as if to be certain Hanley moved his hand away from his nose and spit into the hole. His oyster splashed. He looked up at Sean and nodded.

Sean stared back at him, understanding that Jack Hanley expected him, the helper, to hoist himself down into the pit. Each man was over six feet tall. The blood would reach at least to the level of their shoulders. In order to free the downpipe it would almost certainly be necessary to go under. Dillon shook his head, his voice muffled by his bandana. "I took my shower, Jack. Remember?"

Hanley looked around at his feet. "What if we had a pole-and-hook?"

"You could go up to supply and get one, maybe run into Moran, or you can get this thing over with."

"I'm not sober enough to get in there."

Dillon, who was too sober, laughed, but the space closed in on him. A single dim bulb protruded from a wall socket a dozen yards down the corridor. If he stretched out his arms he could have touched both walls.

Dillon thought suddenly of the catacombs, the tunnels under Rome. Once such an association would have come into his mind with sharp alacrity. He'd have taken comfort in the sense of his own membership in the great communion, for the catacombs were the womb of the Church. But wasn't the womb what he had left? Now he thought of the tunnel-like sub-basement under the residence building at the major seminary. In its cubicles were the side altars where the faculty priests said their private Masses before dawn with cassocked boys like Dillon himself in holy attendance.

Dillon chided himself. It wasn't the womb he'd left, but only training for the priesthood. He rarely welcomed memories from that long, futile phase of his life, and he didn't now. This one had caught him off guard, and he stood there in the dark corridor staring at the unseen with hollow eyes. At moments like that it seemed to him he could feel the blood moving inside his body, but now—blood!—that was an image he wanted no part of. What he wanted was some visual detail on which to fix his concentration, but he saw nothing, save the light bulb itself, with which to stave off his moroseness. The catacombs were where the
martyrs lived and where they buried each other. It probably stank like this, he thought.

"Here goes nothing," Hanley said as he plopped down onto the lip of the hole. He stared into it for a moment, removed none of his clothing and swung down feet-first. "I hate this fucking job. Oh, it's warm!"