Once an Eagle (57 page)

“More years than most of you
can
remember,” Preis answered, and some of the lot crew laughed softly.

“That's right.” Headley paused. He was hoping to get over the next hurdle with one of his witticisms, and it wouldn't come. “Well.” He cleared his throat. “Boys, this is Sam Damon—he's an officer in the Army, and he's an expert on shipping. Mr. Downing has sent him down to see if there's anything he can do to help us straighten things out a little bit here, during his leave. Now, he's outlined a couple of schemes concerning priority shipments that sound pretty good to us. Mr. Downing wants you to give him a hand in any way you can, while he takes a look at things.”

There was no response to this, and Headley went on rapidly, to cover the silence. Preis was staring at Damon with his bemused, crinkly smile. A show-off, Sam thought quickly. A blusterer, a bully; and Headley is afraid of him. He had been mildly surprised when Downing had sent Headley down to the lot with him instead of coming down here with him himself. The best way to delegate authority—assuming that was what you wanted to do—was to delegate it directly.

“Well, I guess that's about all,” Headley concluded. “I know you'll all of you do a great job.” He turned to Sam. “I'll see you in the office at four thirty.” He walked away quickly.

There was a short silence and then Karl Preis strolled up to him. “Well, Mr. Damon. What's on your mind?”

“First, I'd like to check against these.” He held out the sheaf of manifests in his right hand.

Preis laughed genially. “That's a tall order. Those sheds are crammed to bursting. Besides, we got a loading detail around eleven.”

“Well, let's work on it till then.”

They went into the first shed and Damon started checking against the office manifests. There was a solid wall of cartons reaching all the way to the roof. St. Dizier, he thought: the same thing. Everything dumped in helter-skelter, no order or plan. They don't know what they've got, or where it is.

“How is it you didn't leave more alleys?” he asked.

Preis gave his indulgent laugh. “Space, Mr. Damon. The way things have been going, space is at a premium.”

“Then couldn't some of it be stacked on skids outside, under tarps?”

“There's no need for that. I've got it all in my head.”

Damon nodded; he would have to make his first move right now. He said, “Well. Let's take a look, anyway.”

The fat man was incredulous. “You mean
move
all that stuff?”

Damon smiled at him and took off his jacket. “Looks like the only way, doesn't it?”

“Aw, now look—”

But Sam cut him off flatly. “Mr. Downing told me expressly he wanted a complete and accurate inventory of the lot. And that's what we're going to do. Now let's get on it, all right?”

Preis's shrewd little eyes narrowed. “Where you going to put it all?”

“Right outside there. It's a nice day.”

“Okay. It's your funeral.” He turned to the lot crew and called off several names. “Mr. Damon's planning to empty out the sheds this morning.” There was some laughter and a wiry man in a pale blue shirt called, “What in hell for?”

“He's going to check against the office lists,” Preis went on with his jovial smile, and there was more laughter. “All right. Some of you give him a hand.”

They began moving cartons outside and stacking them on pallets. The summer heat had gathered high up under the tin roofs, and before long Damon's shirt was soaked through. Preis watched them from the doorway, his hands in his over-all pockets. It wasn't long before Sam found what he imagined he would—a number of containers with markings different from those listed on the sheets.

“These are three-ninety-threes,” he said to Preis. “What? Yeah, that's right.”

“But according to the manifest they ought to be in Number Seven. What are they doing in here?”

“Oh, that.” Preis shrugged. “It was nearer the siding. I've got it all in my head.”

That told him all he needed to know. If this was how it was in the first shed he'd tackled, this was how it would probably be in all the others. He thought of Tommy taunting him once when he'd drawn duty as mess officer down at Dormer. “You want everything all to be so
organized
—what binkle-bankle difference does it make?”

“We'll have to move them,” he said aloud. “To Number Seven.”

“What?” Preis cried. “What's the sense in that? Number Seven's full up, anyway.”

“Then we'll have to make room there, too.”

The lot superintendent muttered under his breath. “Damon, I'm telling you, you're just making work for yourself.” As though explaining something to a child, he said: “Number Seven was full, so I had these run in here.”

“Is that why they didn't go out on the twenty-third?”

Preis blinked, and then his face began to turn red. “Look, the office—some dame types up a list and they think they've solved it all. There's no
need
for it, I can tell you…”

Damon smiled to himself. It was marvelous: it was fantastic. All those fancy cocktails and liqueurs, and Radio stock soaring to 400, and flying trips to New York and Chicago—and they couldn't cope with one barrel-bellied bully who was blocking all the traffic.

“Preis,” he said quietly, “these three-ninety-threes are going to be moved over to Number Seven.”

The big man swore. “You don't know what you're talking about, Damon.”

“No? I'll make a little bet with you. Just a friendly little bet of twenty dollars. I'll bet there are some more three-ninety-threes back in here. And part of at least three other lines. All tangled up.”

Preis opened his mouth to shout, then stopped. The sweat lay in the folds of his neck. Very slowly, he grinned. “Damon,” he said, “suppose you and I have a little talk about how things are around this lot.”

The lot gang had stopped and were listening avidly now. Sam set down the sheaf of manifests on a carton. “All right, you tell me. How are they?”

“This lot is running fine just the way it is.”

“Is it?”

“And that's the way it's going to remain. Just like it is.”

“Preis,” Damon said, “you'll do as I say, and you'll do it at once.”

The lot foreman swore violently, and then laughed. “Is that right? On whose authority, Damon?”

“Mr. Downing's.”

“You want to go running to Ed Downing, is that it? get me fired?”

“No, I'm not going to go running to Mr. Downing.”

Preis gave the quick, ugly laugh again. “You bet you aren't! My old man owned half this factory—”

“I'm not impressed by your old man.”

“—and I got a hefty interest in it right now … Go ahead,” he shouted, “you go ahead and run up to Ed Downing and see what he tells you …”

Several of the work gang laughed, and the wiry man in the blue shirt said, “That's telling him, Karl!”

This had happened before, then. Periodically some sacrificial lamb had been sent down here to “straighten things out”; and each time the magnitude of the chaos and Preis's bullying had sent him back with his tail between his legs, and the lot had gone from bad to worse.

But this time it wasn't going to turn out that way.

“Preis,” he said softly, setting himself, “I'm not going to go running to anybody at all. I'm going to tell you one more time to empty this shed. And if you give me any more talk—any more at all!—we're going to step outside this shed and I'm going to beat some sense into your stupid head.”

The fat man's jaw dropped, his eyes bugged out. “—I got a bad back,” he said loudly.

“Is that right.”

“Yes, that's right—you don't believe me? Look here, then …” and he slipped the straps of his over-alls and wrenched up his shirt, revealing a broad white girdle bristling with bone and straps and buckles. “Everybody knows that …”

Damon grinned at him. “Well you see, I didn't. I thought it was
all
beer.”

Someone in the lot crew snorted, and Preis, his face purple, began to shout. “You lay a hand on me and my boys'll take care of you fast enough, you'll see!”

Sam smiled at the gang, watching them; they were still enjoying the fun, though in a slightly different way: he could sense the change now. “Well, I certainly don't want to take on the whole crowd,” he said easily. “I thought this was just between you and me, Preis.”

“This isn't the Army, you know, Damon—you're not ordering buck privates around here—”

“Right as rain, chief.”

“Why don't you get the hell on back to your polo ponies and riding britches and officers' clubs and let us run this lot our way, okay?” Preis waved one arm toward the factory. “What do you know about any of this? Hell's bells, you couldn't even
make
it on the outside—or why else did you stay in? Tell me that, ah?”

“…The food,” Damon said in an easy, drawling voice. “I stayed in for the food, Preis.”

The man in the blue shirt laughed wildly at this, and several of the others were grinning. It was going to be all right from here on. The foreman must have sensed it, too—he was waving his arms again and shouting: “All right, we're going up to Ed Downing right now, Damon, we're going to settle this right away—”

Now was the moment. Right now. He walked up to Preis until his face was only inches from the super's. “Preis, you've been goldbricking on this lot for years and you know it. And everybody else knows it, too. Now you're going to stay right here and help straighten out this mess because the whole business depends on it.” He could see the uncertainty in the other man's eyes. Preis wanted to run away, but his pride wouldn't let him. He looked baffled and angry and frightened: he didn't know what was going to happen next—and he, Damon, did know. And that made the difference. “This firm is losing customers because the shipments are fouled up, and only because of that. If it loses too many the firm will go under and there will be no jobs in the plant or out here in the lot, either. Have you ever thought of that? Because that's what will happen.”

The foreman had dropped his eyes, and he talked on quietly and smoothly, making sure the crew heard every word. It was going to go through, because his will was harder than Preis's; because—because people couldn't say no to him. Well, if that was how it was, then let it work for him. It was so simple! A simple matter of enforcing obedience, of checking a destructive and foolish defiance, and those moguls and big-time operators up there in the company offices didn't know how to cope with it. But he did, and he was going to make it work. They would not have understood what made him stand there in the heat, calmly, implacably facing down this petty tyrant: it was not money or advancement or fear or vainglory, but a sense of the fitness of the thing—the essential rightness in doing a job conscientiously and well, bringing order out of chaos.

“But the firm isn't going to go under,” he went on, pitching his voice so it was clearly audible over the distant whine and drum roll of the plant. “You're going to stick with it and give me a hand here because it's for the good of the firm. Because it's a time of prosperity and this factory is going to grow, get bigger and better in every way, and have its share of that prosperity. It means hard work—a lot of hard work—but once it's done the whole business will flow like a river, without a hitch or a foul-up.”

Abruptly he broke away from Preis and faced the group directly. “All right,” he said crisply, “let's turn to. We're going to load outside, under tarps, and see what we've got—and then we're going to whip this lot into shape. And then we're going to keep it that way.” He ran his eyes along the crew. They met his gaze, most of them; three of them were smiling faintly, which was a good sign.

“All right,” he said. “Let's go.”

 

That was step
one. Step two took a little longer. He worked hard. He got to the lot before seven in the morning and he worked until after six at night. It took three weeks but he did what no one had done since the plant had started—he accomplished a total and precise inventory. He reorganized all the sheds according to type and function of container, he initiated a coherent and legible system of symbols that were swiftly intelligible to the lot, the plant, and the office; he got the priorities plan in effect for all shipping. It was exhausting but he did it. He got caught up in the problem; he was bursting with ideas, he could think of nothing else. He even changed the boundaries of the lot to facilitate freight-car loading. Then at Downing's insistence he attacked the raw materials warehouses and set them in order. There was no further trouble with Preis, who pitched in with a vengeance. When Damon heard him bragging to Nickerson one afternoon about the efficiency of the shipping section he knew the campaign was over. Downing was astonished beyond measure; he raised Sam's salary to two hundred a week, then two fifty.

The lush, late summer days slipped by. Weekends they went for picnics on the lake shore or sailing in the Downings' boat; and one evening Peggy tapped the living-room wall with the flat of her little hand and said, “This is our
other
house, isn't it, Daddy?” and he took her in his arms and kissed her. Tommy was radiant and relaxed. It was an idyll—a lovely summer idyll, for all the hard work at the lot, and he was content to let it go at that. They lay in bed late on Sundays, and swam and fished and had a few couples from the firm to dinner. There were no bugles, no parades.

Tommy said nothing more after that first evening, but he could sense her eyes on him now and then. The days swept away, and finally there were two weeks, and then one; the air turned cool and clear with fall, and the first aspen leaves began to skip through the light air, swirling golden shadows.