Rudolf sat thinking dark thoughts of the reservation, wishing he could ignore the guitar-twanging delinquent who was making those ungodly noises on the TV.
“I wonder if any bowling alley around here could use a pinsetter?” Flaherty asked.
“Not since they invented machines to do it,” Rudolf said sourly.
Another long silence. Then Flaherty screwed a hat down over his balding head. “Take care of the place,” he said.
Rudolf inspected the basement. The bacteria needed reseeding. The TV was still blathering when he came back upstairs. Rudolf recognized the moderator of a talk show he had once been on, back before his fall from the liberal cocktail circuit. The man now being interviewed had gray hair and a firm, flabless body. He seemed vaguely familiar. After a moment Rudolf realized it was Pamela’s father.
“Mr. St. Audrey,” the moderator was saying, “how will your new building differ from other skyscrapers?”
St. Audrey smiled. “We hear of the Iron Age. Actually we live in the Ferroconcrete Age. Everything — dams, buildings, roads, airstrips, missile silos — is made of steel covered with concrete.”
“You mean the steel holds it together until the concrete hardens?”
“It’s the other way around. Concrete fills the gaps and protects it but there’s nothing strong enough for a modern skyscraper except steel — until now. We’re going to pour concrete over an aluminum skeleton.”
“How will this make your building different?”
“We could make the walls half as thick or we could build it twice as high.”
“Which did you choose to do?”
St. Audrey smiled again. “Our building is a compromise. It’ll be a hundred fifty stories, not counting the transmitter antennas and copter pads.”
“More congestion for Manhattan! How can all these people possibly get to work?”
“Many employees will live in the same building.”
Music welled in the background and the moderator hinted that another commercial was in the offing.
Aluminum! If only Rudolf could hang on he was going to be right up there swinging with the big boys. He wondered what Flaherty was up to.
CHAPTER 3
He didn’t find out what Flaherty was up to until four hours later. It was approaching midnight when there came a firm knocking on the door. Rudolf remembered that kind of knock from reservation days. It was the knock that comes from a fist firmly attached to an arm that disappears up a uniformed sleeve: A knock firm in its conviction that the knocker is on the side of the angels, crushing crime, correcting corruption, making goddamn sure no Indian ever gets a piece of the action. Rudolf sighed, put on his inscrutability, and opened the door.
“Do you know a Francis X. Flaherty?” the cop asked.
“Yes.”
“He’s sick. Will you take care of him?”
Rudolfs panic was so sudden he had no time to wonder if he was concerned for Flaherty or for the ruin that faced him without Flaherty’s know-how. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Drunk,” the cop said, and poured Francis Xavier Flaherty through the front door.
Rudolf managed a fireman’s carry and got the burly Irishman atop his cot. Flaherty was mumbling incoherently.
“Where did you get the money?” Rudolf asked.
Flaherty emitted a death rattle which Rudolf, on sober reflection some days later, decided was just a snore. He felt Flaherty’s pulse. The Irishman was breathing, but his faint pulse suggested it might not be a continuous process. Rudolf flapped about making coffee. Finally he got Flaherty sitting up and forced him to drink.
“You’re gonna kill yourself,” Rudolf warned. “How much did you put away?”
“Double shot,” Flaherty said weakly.
“A what?” Then Rudolf remembered about livers and the way they come apart from years of drinking until an old drunk can hold progressively less each day. He wondered if Flaherty would live long enough to get the aluminum operation paying. He took a firm resolve to hire a bright young geneticist to backstop the Irishman as soon as possible.
“I had a double shot,” Flaherty repeated. “I felt funny after lifting all that stuff. Guess I shouldn’t have gone back the second time.”
“What stuff?”
“In the car. You’d better go drive it home.” After ineffectual fumbles toward a shirt pocket Flaherty gave up. Rudolf removed a paper from the Irishman’s pocket. It was a receipt for nineteen dollars from Ace Welding and Surplus.
“What have you been up to?” Rudolf asked.
“Sold blood. Wasn’t enough so I went down the street and sold some more.”
Rudolf’s attitude underwent a sudden readjustment.
“Lie still,” he said. He scrounged about the kitchen and found bouillon cubes. He mashed up a handful of cooked beans and spooned the thickened mixture into Flaherty. In moments the Irishman revived.
“I’ll be okay,” he said. “Key’s in my pocket somewhere. You better get the car.”
“Where?”
“That place on the receipt. I got to feeling dizzy so I had a drink next door.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t die in the drunk tank.”
“Aye lad,” Flaherty agreed. “But it helps if you’re Irish.”
Rudolf finished spooning soup into him and made him comfortable. Then he locked up the house and started walking. It took him an hour to find the car and five minutes to return home. Flaherty was snoring in the same position Rudolf had left him. His pulse was stronger now. Rudolf pulled the blanket over him and went out to unload the car.
There was a piece of thick-walled pipe two inches in diameter and a yard long. There were shorter pieces of pipe small enough to slide inside the first. There was a large truck jack and several I-beams welded into a scissors. Rudolf got it inside the house, checked Flaherty again, and went to bed in his own cot, wondering what all the junk was for.
When he awoke, Flaherty was already banging around, setting up the gadgetry he’d bought with his life’s blood. Flaherty was chanting his usual cheerful blasphemies. He was still shaky but Rudolf guessed he’d be all right. He tried to concentrate on the apparatus he was helping Flaherty set up. Finally it dawned on him that there was nothing basically different between this mass of welded I-beams and the cheese press that had gathered dust in one corner of the reservation school since some do-gooder had discovered that beef cattle do not willingly give milk.
They stuffed the thick-walled tubing full of waxy sludge. Flaherty swung the hydraulic jack into position. Rudolf began pumping. They had to remove the follower several times to add more sludge. Finally the waxy mass refused to compress any more. “Are we done?” Rudolf asked.
Flaherty shook his head. He began unbolting and reassembling the scissors in a different way. Now the jack would travel less distance and exert more pressure. Rudolf wondered whether the beams would bend first or the tube would burst.
What happened was wax. Hot and smoking, it poured from the tube. While Rudolf continued pumping Flaherty tried ineffectually to catch the drippings in a dishpan. Most of it ended up on the floor. There was a puff and the press was enveloped in oily flames.
“Don’t stop!” Flaherty yelled. He splashed water, soaking the already sodden rug to prevent the fire from spreading. Finally Rudolf could pump no more.
When the last flame expired, leaving an odoriferous ghost of its passage, Flaherty tossed water on the press. They began gingerly disassembling the steaming press.
Rudolf had supposed the compressed slug of metal would be stuck tighter than an allotment check in the BIA office. To his surprise it fell out of the tube.
“Shrinks faster than steel when it gets cold,” Flaherty explained. The sample was solid and shiny. “Pressure cold-welds those granules into some kind of molecular bond as long as there’s wax to exclude oxygen,” Flaherty said.
“Too bad we can’t sell the wax too.”
“Wait till we can afford better equipment.”
/> The scrap dealer gave Rudolf an odd look but he bought their metal. “Where you getting this kind of scrap?” he asked.
“Secret process.” Rudolf filled in a lengthy form. “Why all the questions?” he asked.
“Cops are on us all the time.”
“How come?”
“Everybody works in a machine shop finds a way to steal. This way the fuzz can check back when somebody wonders why he’s doing twice as much business and selling half as much scrap.”
Rudolf finished filling out the questionnaire and accepted his eighty-nine dollars. He rushed around to Ace Welding and Surplus where Flaherty was supervising construction of a bigger and better press.
Their next load brought five hundred ninety dollars. Flaherty appropriated the five hundred and got off once more at Ace Welding and Surplus. Rudolf took the remaining ninety dollars and stopped at the supermarket.
That night over steaks Flaherty painted glowing pictures of their future. “Have to get out of here,” he said. “Dig any more and the whole house’ll collapse. But please, dear boy, next time you’re in the store ask the gombeen man for a bottle of Tullamore Dew.”
“Do we move to the tropics?” Rudolf asked.
“Not yet. Find another house or a farm. Need lots more money before we can face the big boys.”
With the improved press they did better. The back yard was turning into an increasingly deeper and slimier pit. Blocks of wax were accumulating. Flaherty’s venerable vehicle sprung its springs permanently. They acquired a new pickup. “Need it anyway when we move,” Flaherty said.
Rudolf was tempted to call Pamela St. Audrey but sadly, he realized his new affluence still brought him nowhere near her level. One of these days he was going to throw a really big party; invite all those dip-drecks in the liberal cocktail circuit and rub their noses in it. He might even invite that Mohawk. He wondered what the exstructural iron worker was doing these days. Still living on charity?
There was the flut-sput of a mailman’s scooter. Rudolf no longer expected anything but he could not control his writer’s reflex. He caught the load of junk as it came through the slot. There was another much forwarded envelope for Flaherty. The Irishman tossed it into the trash without comment. There was one for Rudolf from the reservation school where he’d grown up.
It was a begging letter. Rudolf tossed it into the trash with Flaherty’s. The next letter was short and to the point. “Didn’t you pay the rent?” he asked Flaherty.
Flaherty’s jaw dropped open. “Begorra!” he said in the brogue he could turn on or off. “‘Twas the day I needed all that welding on the new press.”
Rudolf sighed. “I’ll take care of it tomorrow,” he said. “Soon’s we sell some more. That damn pickup cleaned us out.”
“Aye,” Flaherty said. “Might as well get on with it.”
They were piling dishes in the sink when the knock came. Rudolf glanced at Flaherty and knew the Irishman also recognized that kind of knock. “Have you done anything illegal?” he asked.
Flaherty shook his head. “You?”
Rudolf opened the door.
“Mr. Rudolf Redwolf?” The cop was young and still wore the icily correct academy look that doesn’t wear off until several uniforms have been puked threadbare.
“My name is Rudolf.”
“Is your last name Redwolf?”
“Last names are a honky invention.”
“There’ve been some complaints,” the young cop began.
“About what?”
“You’ve been selling a lot of scrap metal.”
“That’s illegal?”
“That depends on where you got it.”
“Is somebody missing some?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” the kid cop said, not quite as masterfully as he would have liked.
Rudolf reflected momentarily on the moral advantage that comes from ownership of a new pickup plus the knowledge that there’s more where that came from. “Am I under arrest?” he asked.
“Well, uh no. Not yet.”
“Then bugger off.” Rudolf closed the door firmly in the cop’s face.
“That wasn’t very kind,” Flaherty said. “I wonder who sent him.”
“I’ll give you one guess.”
“Maybe,” Flaherty said, remembering the scrap buyer. “But methinks this is only the beginning.”
They were both in the back yard next morning when Rudolf heard the extra loud chime he’d wired up to overcome the noise of machinery. Flaherty looked at him. They turned off the washing machines and went to answer the door.
The stranger was alone. He was about Flaherty’s age and had the same dissipated look. Rudolf wondered if he was an IRA member.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Francis Xavier Flaherty, a geneticist of some renown,” he said. Before Rudolf could bar him, the stranger had his foot, then himself, inside. “Oh, there you are,” he said.
“Took you long enough,” Flaherty said dispiritedly.
“Who is this?” Rudolf asked.
“Name’s Riordan,” Flaherty said in his transit-mix voice. “Come to drag me back to the brothel.”
“Well now,” Riordan said placatingly, “you can’t say they’ve been less than generous.”
“That I can’t,” Flaherty said. “And if there’s a cool corner in hell I hope you get it.”
“Doing well?” Riordan asked.
“We’re eating.”
“When are you coming back?”
“I’m not.”
“You signed a contract.”
“Which you violated.”
“If it’s a question of money I think they’ll be amenable…”
“Not only would your principals not be amenable,” Flaherty sighed. “They have neither the mental nor the moral equipment to understand what could buy me. Now finish up your snooping and get out.”
Riordan shuffled embarrassedly on the mud-soaked carpet. “I guess there’s nothing more to say,” he said.
“We understand each other perfectly.” Flaherty closed the door and locked it.
Rudolf looked at him. “I don’t like to pry,” he finally said, “but is there something in your past that can throw a crimp into our business?”
Flaherty poured coffee and sat. “I’m a genetic engineer,” he said. “It’s not the biggest field in the world.”
“Who’s this guy, Riordan?”
“Used to be one of New York’s Finest. Now he’s a private eye.”
“Who has you under contract?”
“The government.”
Rudolf blanched. Every Indian knows the catastrophes that result from putting an X on the White Father’s paper. First, he supposed, would come some kind of a cease and desist order, followed by a baker’s dozen of injunctions. Somebody would freeze their bank accounts. Somebody would ship him back to the reservation.
Then Rudolf grinned. The scrap business was geared to winos picking up change for another bottle. Scrap dealers paid cash. Abruptly Rudolf remembered they would be forwarding Xeroxes to the IRS. He’d have to find an accountant and see about making quarterly estimates. But that could wait another week or two. First they had to pay the rent. He looked at Flaherty. They went into the back yard and began shoveling muck into the row of washing machines.
“Not directly,” Flaherty said over the hum of machinery.
“What?”
“The government didn’t have me under contract directly. They do it through one of those fronts that have college kids so uptight these days.”
Suddenly Rudolf guessed what it was all about. No wonder Flaherty was a bitter drunk. “They had you working on biological warfare?”
“Something like that. Once we make some money I want to get back to my own research. Humanity needs a high tolerance yeast.”
“You’re from Ireland,” Rudolf said.
“Clever of you to notice that.”
“What I meant was — uh, well…”
“I know. It’s a reserva
tion too.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Where else could a grown man waste two thousand hours out of his life studying religion when he might be learning something useful?”
“I could name you two places within ten miles.”
“Aye.” Flaherty spat and redoubled his efforts with the shovel. “I suppose I should be thankful. ‘Twas meditatin’ on the Immaculate Conception that first got me thinkin’. Now there was a bit o’ genetic tinkerin’ for yez. Poor sod only had half his chromosomes. No wonder he got nailed up.”
That evening they had a load of metal ready but they decided to wait till morning. Rudolf and Flaherty agreed that they ought to buy some clothes, clean up, and have an evening out. Then they settled again for what the refrigerator would yield. They were tired. Also, both men were obsessed with the feeling that something was going to happen soon. And the more money they had the better prepared they would be.
“About that contract,” Rudolf said. “Do you know a good lawyer?”
“I know a lot of bad ones.”
Rudolf sighed and turned on the news.
“… Increasing concern over thousands of dying fish in the upper Hudson. Slowly, the source of pollution is moving downstream. Despite massive efforts by special ecology teams, no poison has been detected. A spokesman for Nader’s Raiders said…”
Rudolf switched channels. Nothing but news everywhere. This time the commentator wore his quizzical, flying saucer smile as he talked about” … more flashes, mysterious detonations, and a very slight rise in background radioactivity. Despite some of the more hysterical claims, few people believe Russian submarines are operating in the Hudson. When asked if the US was experimenting with something that flashes, makes loud noises, and possibly kills fish, a navy spokesman said, ‘No comment’…”
“Just what we need,” Rudolf growled, “another war and somebody snatching our process in the name of patriotism.”
There was a knock on the door. Rudolf looked at Flaherty. This time both knew it wasn’t a cop. When Rudolf opened the door it turned out to be the agent who’d rented them the house. He was a small man with an epicene fussiness of dress. He took one look at the mud-soaked carpet and rolled his eyes skyward.
The Aluminum Man Page 3
