Tinman

by Karen Black

  “Dr. Spreckles?’ I asked.”

  “‘No, but you can take the call in Dr. Spreckles’ office,’ she says, obviously recognizing me for the first time as an adult person, not just a mere student.

  “I get on the phone. ‘Am I addressing Gregory McGregor, the number one gillie of Edmond the Eminent Expert?’ a strange voice asks.”

  “‘I guess so,’ I say uncertainly, finding it disconcerting to hear my professor, the great Edmond Wingate Spreckles, referred to in such irreverent terms.”

  “‘Don’t guess,’ the voice says, ‘Engineers form reasoned opinions based on evidence and sound scientific principles. If you are uncertain about your identity, perhaps it can be quantified in terms of a statistical probability.’”

  “‘The probability is essentially 100 percent that I am Gregory McGregor,’ I say, beginning to dig Charley’s slightly off-beat humor.”

  “‘Essentially,’ the voice says, ‘a typical academic weasel word in a yes or no situation. Well, we’ll just proceed on the assumption that you are indeed Gregory McGregor and we need you down here in Ecuador.’”

  “‘What about Dr. Spreckles?’ I ask, knowing he was supposed to be in Ecuador on some kind of consulting job, and this had to have something to do with it.”

  “‘Good question,’ the voice says, ‘but one we can best deal with in the field, so to speak. Now listen to me, McGregor,’ his voice suddenly cutting like a chain saw, ‘get your ass down here to Ecuador before your dear old prof makes a bigger ass of himself.’”

  “Just like last Friday. Charley wouldn’t take no for an answer. A ticket and a travel advance, he says, are on the way by special delivery. He gives me a contact in the State Department to get a quick passport, and tells me he’ll be waiting for me in a week at the Hotel de las Ojos Caliente in a little place called Bãnos in the Eastern Andes. Any resistance I considered putting up crumbled when Charley mentioned more money per day than I was used to making in a week…hell…in a month. Seven days later I get off the plane at Quito, and a short, stocky guy with wrap-around dark glasses, gold teeth and a pompadour comes up to me.”

  “‘You McGregor?’ I nod my head. ‘I drive you to Bãnos.’ He thumps his chest. ‘You know Mario Andretti? I Mario Andretti of the Andes.’”

  “Five hours later we pull up in front of a Spanish baroque hotel–the first time the guy had used his brakes since Quito–and I stumble, white-knuckled, into the bar for a stiff drink. The only customer in there is a funny little pink-faced fat man in a white linen suit, sitting at a table with a bottle of scotch, two glasses and a bucket of ice. He waves his hand toward a chair. ‘Sit ye doon, MacGregor laddie,’ he says, giving a big burr to his r’s. ‘A wee drap o’ Glenfiddich will erase the shadows of your recent brush wi’ eternity.’”

  “It sounds like Charley,” Corky said wistfully, “but where did he get the Scottish brogue bit?”

  “Pure Hollywood. If I’d come from the South, no doubt he would have been sitting there with a bottle of Rebel Yell bourbon and put on an ole’ Colonel Saunders drawl.”

  “‘So what do you know about this job?’ he asked me as soon as a Scotch on the rocks had a chance to hit bottom.’”

  “‘Nothing.’”

  “‘Delightful!’ Charley said. ‘Then I have news for you. You happen to know more about it than anyone else in this whole wide world.’ Charley made a great ceremony of hauling a thick report bound in a blue cover from his briefcase. He slapped it down in front of me. ‘Read the title page’ he demanded, ‘out loud. I love the way it rolls off the tongue.’”

  “‘Geotechnical Analysis and Structural Design; Trans-Andes Highway,’ I read.”

  “‘Go on.’”

  “‘A Report Prepared for TINMAN Inc. by Edmund Wingate Spreckles, DSc, ASCE, Licensed Engineer.”’

  “‘Now,’ said Charley, clearly relishing the moment, ‘read the very last page.’”

  “I flopped the report over and turned to the back cover. The last page contained the last few references of the bibliography, and below, in the half page left over, scrawled in Professor Spreckles’ slightly shaky hand was, ‘Nice job, Greg–A’ It took a few seconds for it to sink in. I ruffled through the all too familiar pages. It was all there–a major term paper I had worked my heart out on a couple of years earlier in an advanced seminar. Professor Spreckles had given us a great mass of data: driller’s logs, soil and rock tests, maps, surveys and geologic reports–all supposedly hypothetical, not relating to any real place, a strictly academic exercise. We were supposed to design a first class highway through the area, complete with construction methods, time and cost estimates and the rest. I thought it was a really challenging problem, and I proposed a radical departure from conventional design involving extensive tunneling with moles–boring machines like those we just passed. I tried to make the report look as realistic and professional as I could, I got an A, and that was that.”

  “‘So, who the hell ever looks at the last page in a bibliography,’ Charley said sardonically as he watched my ears turn red. ‘But give Edmund the Eminent Expert credit for being a great salesman. He sold TINMAN completely on your design concept. Of course, he had a good product to sell. The problem is that the Eminent Expert turns out not to understand it very well. We brought him down here to help us in a dispute with one of our contractors, and we’re beginning to think he never really read your homework. But I happen to be one of those odd people who actually browse through bibliographies, and so I came upon his little autographed testimonial to your work at the end. Consider it to be your report card, which got xeroxed along with everything else in your report except, of course, a substitute title page for your original title page to show the Eminent Expert as author–not you. In fact, nowhere else in this excellent document does your name appear.’

  “‘That makes you the real expert, but all we had was your nickname, Greg. So, I called your Department and asked for Greg. ‘Do you mean Gregory McGregor, Dr. Spreckles’ research assistant?’ your Departmental secretary asks brightly. ‘Sounds like a Greg doubled in spades, says I. How many other Gregs do you have?’ ‘Well, really, he’s the only one,’ she replies. ‘Then ‘tis McGregor himself I’m callin’,’ says I. ‘So, there you were, and here you are.’”

  “‘What about Dr. Spreckles now?’ I asked, rather apprehensively, not relishing the thought of meeting him under these circumstances, knowing he would be chairing the committee at the defense of my doctoral thesis in the spring.”

  “‘Not to worry,’ says Charley airily. ‘The Eminent Expert has several problems. One of them is booze. Another is dames. Right now he is shacked up in Pujo with a red-headed Romanian refugee and a case of Armagnac. Don’t worry about your degree,’ he added, sensing the source of my anxiety, ‘with what I have on the Eminent Expert I need only drop a hint and he’ll be pushing you for Summa cum Laude.’”

  “Did he,” Corky asked, “push you for Summa cum Laude?”

  “As a matter of fact he did, but I don’t think Charley twisted his arm.”

  “Just a gentle hint?”

  “Hey,” I bristled a little indignantly, “why doesn’t anybody think I was good enough to get it on my own?”

  Corky shook her head, teasingly. “Tsk, Tsk. So what happened then?”

  “We went off to look at the job, Charley with his white buck shoes and linen suit, Panama hat and Malacca cane, walking amidst the ukes….”

  “Ukes?” Corky asked.

  “Huge dump trucks that are made in Euclid, Ohio. Hence the name. They were roaring up and down the canyon along with bulldozers, track drills, mucking machines and all the rest, run by grimy guys in hard hats and coveralls. Charley picks his way through it with never a speck of dust seeming to settle on him, and everything pulls up short to give him the right-of-way. We make our way up to the field office, a big trailer perched on the crest of a spur jutting out into the canyon with a panoramic view of the job. It was strange. I’d never been there, but
I’d pored over the maps, surveys and cross sections so much it was like I’d always been there. Except my first look at it was a bit of a shock. A big landslide had come down and wiped out the portal of the main tunnel.

  “Charley read my mind easily enough and told me not to take it personally; that it came from cutting corners on my ‘elegant design.”’

  “He sat back in the Morris chair behind the Project Manager’s desk, swiveled around and put his white bucks up on the window sill, put his fingers together very precisely and looked sideways at me for what seemed like a long time. ‘Just how hard-nosed are you, McGregor?’ he asked at last.”

  “I was baffled. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘This is the first time anyone ever came right out and put it to me.’”

  “‘I know,’ Charley said. ‘You’re a nice college boy….’ Just then the outside door slammed against the side of the building and the whole field office shook. Charley smiled benignly. ‘About 7.6 on the Richter scale, I’d say. Hang in there, mi lad, you’re about to meet Buddy Lee McGee.’”

  “With that, the office door banged open and the entire door frame filled up. Wide was the word. This man was wide. Everything about him was wide. His face was wide. His features were wide, his neck, shoulders, arms, hands, belly, thighs, everything. Besides which, he was a good six feet six inches tall. He was wearing about as wide a grin as you will ever see, his eyes crinkling until they were little more than slits in all that wideness. He engulfs my hand, which I never thought of as small, in his.”

  “‘Well,’ he drawls, ‘I reckon you’re the young feller come down here to pick up after the perfesser.’”

  “‘To tell the truth,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here. Mr. Farnsworth was just about to get into that.”’

  “‘Well then, you’re about to find out that this here is where the rubber meets the road, so let me give you somethin’ from an ol’ boy that’s been round the block a few times. Things ain’t never quite the same out here in the field as they is back there on the drawin’ board. Now Mr. Farnsworth…you’re gonna git to callin’ him Charley, so we might as well start now. Charley here and the perfesser are drawin’ board men. And they’re good at it. They’re real good, even if I say so myself. But they’re lookin’ at drawin’ boards, and I’m lookin’ at rock–22,000 yards of it. And it’s settin’ down there in the portal cut where the drawin’ board boys don’t show no rock, and I’m here to tell you somebody’s got to get paid to move it.”’

  “‘Well, now, Buddy Lee,’ Charley interposed, ‘let’s not get this young man confused with our small misunderstandings before he’s even had a chance to review the benching sequence.”’

  “‘Benching sequence, my ass!’ Clearly this was a phrase that stung Buddy Lee. ‘That rock was gonna come down no matter what goofy, bass-ackward scheme you had for taking it out.’”

  “‘The fact is,’ Charley’s voice was sweet and reasonable, ‘we were paying you to take it out in our goofy old bass-ackward way, not to dump it in the portal cut, hurt some people, and get paid again to clean it up. If you’d followed the benching plan according to the specs and still lost the ground, no question about it, it would be our rock, but as it is, Buddy Lee, it’s all yours.’”

  “‘Now just one damn minute.’ Buddy Lee’s neck and ears were getting red. ‘Ain’t no way I’m gonna muck that pile fer nothin’. I’ll pull every fuckin’ piece of equipment off this job and shut ‘er down first.’”

  “‘Now, now,’ Charley said soothingly. ‘You wouldn’t want to do that. Why, you’d have your whole outfit tied up in court here in Ecuador for years, and you’d lose all those liquidated damages besides.”’

  “‘Liquidated damages! Liquidated damages!’ Buddy Lee was bellowing and pounding the desk hard enough to shake the whole office.”

  “What are liquidated damages?” Corky broke in.

  “Money withheld from contract payments until the job is completed properly.” I explained.

  “‘Liquidated damages,’ Buddy Lee shouts. ‘That’s takin’ money I already earned!”’

  “Suddenly Charley bolted upright, jerked his feet from the window sill and stared out the window. ‘How absolutely fantastic!’ he cried. ‘Did you see that?’ Buddy Lee and I craned our necks toward the window, half expecting to see another landslide or some other earth-shaking phenomenon, but there were no clouds of dust, and everything seemed to be moving normally down on the job.”

  “‘For Christ sake, what the fuck is it now?’ Buddy Lee bellowed.”

  “‘A Humboldt Lesser Pilates Hummingbird just darted by!’ Charley cried ecstatically.”

  “Buddy Lee was speechless. His mouth opened and shut a couple of times. ‘Well fancy that,’ he finally croaked in a hoarse falsetto, ‘a pixilated humbug!’ Suddenly his voice came roaring back. ‘Well let me tell you something, you fat little sissy,’ he yelled, ‘there’s a lot crazier birds than pixilated humbugs flittin’ around this job!’ And then he stormed out.”

  “‘Good ol’ Buddy Lee,’ Charley chuckled. ‘He knew he was licked, but there’s no way a fat little sissy like me is ever going to go nose-to-nose and have the last word with one of those characters. I only wish I could add Buddy Lee’s pixilated humbug to my bird list.”’

  “‘From what you have told me of my professor, there may be a few more around here,’ I offered somewhat ruefully.”

  “Charley laughed. ‘I think you and I are going to work out all right, McGregor.”’

  Corky was silent for a long time after I finished the story. She turned to me, a somewhat bittersweet expression on her face, “What about you?” she asked, “what did you think when you first met Charley? Did you think of him as a fat little sissy?”

  I thought about it, trying to dredge up those elusive first impressions. “Only momentarily, fleetingly, and then Charley’s smarts started showing through, and along with the realization that it took a particular kind of guts for Charley just to be himself, not just to hold his own, but in an odd way to dominate all those macho guys. In a way all he had going for him was his brains, which admittedly was enough to put most everybody else at a disadvantage, but brains wouldn’t have been nearly enough if he hadn’t had guts to go with it. It’s surprising how much I came to love the guy.”

  “I know,” Corky said, and we fell silent.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Monday Afternoon, Grand Junction

  It was just past eleven. “Someplace in this vast wasteland of rock and country western there must be an eleven o’clock news break,” I said and flipped on the radio. An announcer was saying, “…postponing our usual coverage of national and world news at this time to bring you a story just breaking in Aspen. Shortly after ten o’clock this morning an Aspen police officer was shot and critically wounded, apparently when he interrupted an intruder in a condominium belonging to Mr. Charles Farnsworth of Los Angeles. Mr. Farnsworth has just been identified as the victim of a mugging yesterday in Denver in which he was robbed and fatally stabbed. A connection between these crimes is yet to be established.

  “The officer, Peter Zimmerfeld, is in critical condition in Aspen hospital and as yet cannot be questioned. According to the police log of telephone calls, Miss Corky Gonzales, well-known professional skier and off-season occupant of the Farnsworth condominium, called earlier in the morning to ask the police to keep the house under surveillance in her absence. She is believed to be en route to visit friends in Denver. She reported that a man with binoculars had been displaying an unusual interest in the house. An intensive man-hunt is underway for the suspect, described as black with a large frame and wearing black leather trousers and jacket. Miss Gonzales, or anyone aware of her destination in Denver, is asked to contact the police immediately. The following update has just been handed to me. Officer Zimmerman is in surgery and it will be several hours before he can be questioned. We will interrupt our regular programming to report on new developments as they occur in this fast-breaking story.
”

  The newscast went on to report on such items as the price of monkey wrenches at the Pentagon, and Corky, hands shaking, switched it off. “Oh, God, Greg, what have I done to Pete? What can we do now?”

  “It’s a good ten miles to the next exit before we can do anything, so let’s think it over.” I reached for her small, cold hand and held it closely. “In the first place, you haven’t done anything to Pete, and you haven’t done anything wrong. You did your duty as a citizen when you reported a suspicious character, and Pete did his duty as a police officer when he went to check it out. You even warned him the man might be dangerous.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t tell him all I knew about Charley’s murder, and I lied about going to Denver.”

  “That may be true, but where you were going makes absolutely no difference, and all you knew about Charley’s murder was second hand from me. Hearsay, as they say in court. I think I have very good reasons for keeping under cover, and there are good reasons for you to protect that cover and stay under cover now yourself. The police have made the connection between Charley and the shooting in Aspen, and that’s all we can do in Colorado. I’m the only link between Charley and whatever is going on in Los Angeles and Alaska, and if I go public, whoever or whatever is driving this bloody game will have plenty of chances to cover up.

  “But what about Pete?”

  “What can you do for him now? You can make him chicken soup and hold his hand, which I have to admit is a very nice morale builder. What else?”

  Corky sat silently. The sign for the Palisade exit, ten miles out of Grand Junction, came into view. “Greg,” Corky said, her voice small and strained, “turn around and take me back to Aspen.”

  I swung down the exit ramp and into a nearby picnic area in a grove of big cottonwood trees just leafing out in fresh spring green. I turned off the motor, and we sat and glumly looked at each other. “I have to go back, Greg. Everyone will wonder where I am. They’ll think maybe I’ve been hurt or something.” There seemed to be nothing for me to say. I stared grimly at her. “Be reasonable, Greg. Think of all the things that will have to be done about Charley’s condo. And besides, there’s poor Pete.” Then after a long pause, “Please, Greg, say something. Be reasonable.”