Sons (29 page)

“I was referring to my friend here, Will Tyler.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars.”

“Which I’ll pay.”

“Which he will of course pay because he’s a trustworthy and decent human being.”

“Not like that son of a bitch Andy, how do you like that son of a bitch?” Smythe said at last, and grinned and actually gave Ace an elbow.

“I take it that Andy is the guy who put the horns on you,” Ace said.

“That’s who he is, all right. Biggest mistake I ever made in my life,” Smythe said.

“Would you like to know why Will Tyler owes the squadron thirty-seven dollars?”

“No, why?” Smythe said.

“Because he put thirty-seven bullets into the screen, and all thirty-seven of them made holes longer than the legally prescribed length of two inches. That’s why.”

“Thirty-seven holes, my, my,” Smythe said.

“Thirty-seven holes at one dollar a hole equals thirty-seven dollars, if my addition is correct,” Ace said.

“Your addition is flawless,” I said.

“Are you boys fliers?” Smythe asked.

“We are very hot pilots,” I said.

“Are you familiar with air gunnery, sir?” Ace asked.

“Oh no,” Smythe said.

“There’s a B-26 that tows a screen for us to shoot at,” Ace said. “We use a B-26 because it’s the only one of the bombers that can simulate the speed of an enemy fighter. The screen is made of woven wire...”

“Oh, I see,” Smythe said.

“... wrapped in thread, and we fire live bullets at the screen. Fifty-caliber machine-gun bullets.”

“Oh yes.”

“Each pilot has different colored bullets. So at the end of the day we can see how many hits he’s made. Will’s bullets today were red.”

“Old Red Bullets Tyler,” I said.

“Now there’s an angle beyond which we are not supposed to attack because shooting down the bomber is
not
the objective, sir, definitely not the objective.”

“No, no.”

What he was trying to explain to Captain Smythe whose wife had run off with Andy the real estate man was that you came up on the screen (you usually
rose
to meet enemy lighters because they tried to attack an escorted bomber formation from above, a position that gave them the advantage in speed and maneuverability) you came
up
on the screen in a flight of four airplanes, your bullets painted in one of the primary colors, red, blue or yellow, with green thrown in for good measure. Because the screen was constructed of tightly woven wire mesh, the bullets left a streak of paint behind them whenever you scored a hit. Now when you attacked the screen in a perpendicular pass, it was difficult to hit because you were traveling in different directions and had to lead it the way you would a flying duck. But if you fell
behind
the screen it became easier to hit because you were then traveling in the same direction at almost identical speeds and it was somewhat like firing at a stationary target instead of a moving one. At the same time, though, you were endangering the bomber because it was now
ahead
of you, say at one or two o’clock level, and there was the possibility of ripping its tail assembly to shreds with your enthusiastic slugs. The further you fell behind the screen in your pass, the more oblique was the firing angle, with the result that the slashes you put into the target got longer and longer. That was what Ace was trying to explain to the drunken captain from Massachusetts.

“... costing the United States Government a considerable amount of money should a bomber get shot down by accident.”

“Naturally.”

“There is a fine of one dollar per bullet for each bullet that has left a telltale hole larger than two inches.”

“Oh yes.”

“Today, Fearless Will Tyler put thirty-seven such holes in the screen, thereby causing the pilot of the B-26 to have a screaming shit fit. I tell you, sir, Will Tyler is already a flier of renown, even though he has not yet shot down a single enemy plane. He almost got one of
ours
today, but that doesn’t count. I ask you, Will, I ask you now in the presence of this grieving officer and gentleman...”

“That’s me,” Smythe said.

“I ask you why the hell you did such a dumb fool thing?”

“Because it was fun,” I answered.

June 27, 1944

June 29, 1944

The temperature in Chicago on that Sunday, July 27, had readied ninety-five degrees by four o’clock that afternoon, and there was scant relief from the oppressive mugginess, even on the beach. In Eau Fraiche, on a day like this, we would have packed a picnic lunch and gone down-peninsula where the breeze blowing in off Lake Juneau would smell of pine and the water would be as clear and as icy cold as a cut diamond. Here in Chicago (which Mr. Sandburg three years ago had called “half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher,” and I didn’t know how right he was till now) we sat on a lakeside beach and wondered if we wouldn’t anyway be basted in our own fat.

On days like today, when Chicago seemed out to destroy us personally, when her buildings crowded in too tight, and her people jostled and pushed and talked too loud, the thought would again cross my mind that maybe I’d been shell-shocked over there, otherwise why would I have done a crazy thing like sacrificing the eight-dollar deposit on the Mechanic Street apartment and paying all those freight charges to have our new furniture moved here? Nancy crying and saying she did not
wish
to go to Chicago, and my telling her there was opportunity for me there,
what
opportunity? A madman’s dream I had caught in a butterfly net on our honeymoon?

The advertisement had appeared in the
Tribune,
asking for a man with some knowledge of the paper industry to start as a traineee at Ramsey-Warner Papers, which was opening a new mill on the waterfront at Kedzie and Thirty-first. The waterfront had turned out to be the West Fork of the South Branch of the Chicago River, and the new mill would not be completed until June 1921, but in the meantime they were willing to retrain experienced people in their own production methods, and were willing to pay twenty-two dollars a week besides, which was not exactly alfalfa where I came from. So I had gone to see a Mr. Moreland out at the Joliet mill, and I had told him that whereas I did not have any experience in the paper industry, I did know a considerable lot about timber, having worked in a logging camp from the time I was fifteen until the time I enlisted in the Army—

“Oh, are you a veteran?” Mr. Moreland asked.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“See any combat?”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I was with the Third Division at the Marne and later fought in the Meuse-Argonne offensive.”

“We were hoping for somebody with at least
some
experience, though,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Well, I haven’t any experience, sir,” I said, “but I’m a hard worker. I’ve got a wife to support, you see, and...”

“Oh, are you married, Taylor?”

“Tyler. Yes, sir, I was married just last Sunday. I’m here in Chicago on my honeymoon.”

“You’re applying for a job while you’re on your honeymoon?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, well,” Mr. Moreland said.

“Sir,” I said, “I can’t see any future for me in timber.”

“Can you see one in paper?”

“Yes, sir, I can,” I said.

“When’s your honeymoon over, Taylor?”

“Tyler. On the twenty-first of April.”

“Can you start on May first?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Then I guess you’re hired.”

“Thank you, sir,” I said, and that was that.

I was always having to break things to Nancy after I’d already gone and done them, it seemed. I told her that night about my taking the job, and she said she thought I was crazy, so I reminded her that not so long ago she had said she’d come with me even to Paris if that’s where I wanted to go, and she said, Pardon? which she said a lot lately when she heard things she didn’t want to hear.

The apartment on Springfield and Twenty-eighth was nice, even Nancy had to admit that, a far sight nicer than the one we’d agreed to rent in Eau Fraiche. But Chicago was overwhelming, and I thought I would never get used to it. In our first several weeks there, I imagined I would choke each time I walked out into the street, the soot and grime were so terrible. Smoke poured from a thousand chimneys, prairie dust billowed up from the sidewalks, filth seemed everywhere in evidence, despite the big iron litter bins on the curbs, two and a half feet long and eighteen inches high, but so positioned that you had to step into the gutter to lift the lid and drop anything into them.

The buildings were another thing, not as big as some I’d seen in New York but enough to make me dizzy anyway whenever I looked up at one of them. In Eau Fraiche, the tallest building had been the Wisconsin Trust over on Carter Street, six stories high and considered huge. Here in Chicago, the City Hall and County Building covered the entire square between La Salle, Randolph, Washington and Clark Streets. Even the post office filled a whole city block, a big slate-gray building with a huge dome in the center and openwork stone balustrades over the pillared wings on each of its four sides. Of all the architecture in Chicago, I think I felt most comfortable with the two lions outside the Art Institute, themselves enormous, but affectionately called “prairie dogs” by the people of the city. I was not yet a Chicagoan. I could not get used to the grime or the size, I could not get used to the lack of open space, and most of all, I could not get used to the noise.

Trolley cars rattled and clanked over countless switch intersections, iron wheels raising a din so loud you could hardly hear yourself speak, whether you were riding in one or walking alongside it on the sidewalk. There were more automobiles in two Chicago city blocks than there were in all of Eau Fraiche (well, maybe I’m exaggerating) and they made more noise with their honking horns and squeaking brakes and squealing tires and broken wheel chains than I had ever heard anywhere else except on the battlefield in France. There were still a lot of horses in Chicago, too, clomping along, pulling coal wagons that tumbled their clattering loads onto chutes into open basement windows, hauling wagons carrying jangling scrap iron and junk, drivers screaming at their teams, policemen blowing whistles, and over it all the elevated trains pounding in from north, south, and west, to add to the resounding cacophony that was the parallelogram of the Loop. I could not stand anything about Chicago.

Moreover, I was beginning to think in those first few months that the paper industry wasn’t exactly for me. My job was to stand between the barker and the woodpecker, which did not mean that I was positioned between a dog and a bird, though the foreman did have a dog, a Welsh terrier who nipped at my heels and who went frantic each time the cranes piled up a new shipment of eight-foot-long logs. It seemed to me that a dog who went crazy at the sight of wood shouldn’t have been hanging around a paper mill. I’d never liked dogs, anyway. (That’s not true. I started disliking dogs when the Germans were using them in the war.) This particular little dog was called Offisa Pupp after the cartoon character, and he started hating me the day I reported to work. My partner on the job was a fellow named Allen Garrett, a strapping six-footer from Chicago’s South Side, who, like me, was seeking to make a “future” in the paper industry. Allen worked with me at the far end of the barking drum where the peeled logs came out. We both held spiked picaroons in our hands, and we — well, I think I’d better explain what I was beginning to learn about making paper from wood.

Back in Eau Fraiche, we always cut a felled tree into eight-foot lengths, but the drum barker wasn’t designed to take such big chunks of wood and also you couldn’t make paper out of wood that still had the bark on it. So the first thing that happened was all the logs were piled up in these towering pyramids and then dumped into what was called the hot pond, which was a big concrete basin through which hot waste water from other parts of the plant flowed. This was done to soften the bark and get rid of leaves and ice and clinging forest dirt. Then they were carried up a jack-ladder conveyer to the circular saw where they were cut into four-foot lengths so they could be taken to the drum barker. I came in after the drum barker, some exciting job, I was not exactly an executive.

The drum barker, or the barking drum as we also called it, was a cylindrical steel tube open at both ends, close to fifteen feet in diameter and some forty-five feet long. Supported by rollers and enormous steel tires, power-driven by chain belts slung from overhead and spaced along its entire length, the drum received a tangle of logs on a conveyer belt from the hot pond and the cut-off saw, tumbled, tossed, and sprayed them for maybe fifteen minutes, and then plunked them stripped and white onto a conveyer belt at the other end. The drum made a lot of noise, as what wouldn’t with thousands of logs banging into each other and shedding their skins, the loosened bark dropping through the open-rib construction onto another conveyer belt, to be whisked away as fuel for the steam plant. At the far end of the drum, Allen Garrett and I studied each of the logs as they went by on the conveyer belt. If we saw one with a section of bark still clinging to it, or a furrow filled with pitch, or a knot, we hooked it with our picaroons and rolled it over to the woodpecker, where the operator there would either drill out the knot or grind off the bark, after which we rolled the log back onto the conveyer belt. I knew nothing at all about what happened to the wood once it moved deeper into the mill. I was new in this business, and it was a bore.