Big Man, A Fast Man

by Appel, Benjamin

  That crowd had been watching quiet. Mining people learn how to live with death like it’s a cousin. The women setting the table for the man of the house every evening, and every evening, he comes home, and then one evening he doesn’t. In the empty chair you’ve got something smelling of gas and the damp earth. That crowd had been watching quiet. But my carrying-on started up one of the women. She let out a wail and that started up another woman, the men cursing. It’s all mixed up what I remember, what my mother and my uncle Robbie told me later. All I know is that my uncle Robbie was walking with me to the cage. We went in. Far away in the sun there were a whole lot of faces. And then the cage began to sink, the faces going and the sun jumping to the top of the culm. Jumping higher and higher all the time like it was running on yellow legs. Jumping to the mountains ringing in our valley and then it was caught. Caught good. Caught dark. It was so dark in the cage. The only light the shaft-opening high up. A square cut out of light, and getting further and further away, and the darkness coming in. The only light the lamps on the miners’ hats. We passed the abandoned tunnels where the top coal’d been mined out. Like streets you see in a dream leading God only knows where. To all those secret places behind your eyes when your eyes are closed. We went down and down and I thought we’d never stop but we stopped. There were a lot of lights. And the rescue squads. They looked at me and asked all kinds of questions. My uncle Robbie told me later. Who was I and what did I want.

  I remember nothing of this. I remember holding my uncle’s hand and walking out of the shaftway into a tunnel. Then we came to another tunnel where my uncle had to stoop, where there were tracks shining and lumps of coal on the ground. We came to where the cave-in was. There were lights. Blinding big lights. And straight ahead what could have been a landslide. Digging at it, were the rescue squads. My uncle gave me a shovel and told me where to dig. He worked with a pick.

  Those eight miners. They were caught in the eight little rooms they’d made for themselves so careful. No room in their house could’ve been made more careful. They’d measured out the powder careful and lit it careful. Built the walls and the roof, put the props in careful and only then were they ready to dig coal. What’s all this, you wonder? I’ll tell you. It’s from the little speech I used to give when I was organizing steel. My father, he became a speech.

  After a while my uncle tried to get to me to rest, to eat something. But I wouldn’t stop. He said, “Billy, you can’t dig your father out without no strength.” That stopped me. I went with him to where a bunch were chewing on sandwiches. They said to sit down. They gave me a sandwich. I sat there but I couldn’t eat. I asked my uncle Robbie if we were going to dig my father out. “Sure,” he said but one of the miners said he should tell me the truth. My uncle Robbie said, “We don’t know if a man of them’s alive. All we can do is keep digging and hoping.” I felt awful. My uncle held me tight but I didn’t cry and I didn’t quit. I went back to the digging. I dug and dug and I kept thinking, Papa, I’ll find you.

  Find, yeh. All I found out was how short a man’s life is on this earth. When I was organizing steel I’d talk about that miners’ funeral. How it was Baptist earth for my father. Greek Orthodox and Roman Catholic for the others. I turned the whole eight of them into signatures on union cards. That was one of the worst days in my life, that funeral. But it didn’t stop me from using my own father. I knew it would’ve been okay with him. He was a staunch union man.

  That was when we moved to McKeesport. To my uncle Lennie’s house. The union bought us our tickets. My uncle Lennie gave us a roof. That’s all my mother would take from him. She had the pride of a new widow besides the Irish pride in her. She said we were going to earn our keep. That meant her and it meant me, the oldest. I got a job as a delivery boy after school and all day Saturday. I was the best son a mother ever had if I say so myself. When it came Sunday she wanted me to play baseball. “God won’t mind a boy having some fun his day off,” she’d say to my uncle’s wife. That one was always after me to go to church. She was Czech, my aunt. She went to Saints Peter and Paul with her kids. My uncle Lennie never went. He backed up my mother. He was one of these quiet men. So quiet he looked dumb. But he was the only one of my mother’s brothers to escape the mine.

  That McKeesport is full of churches but what made it was steel. National Tube. McKeesport Tin Plate. Firth Stirling. The Chrystie Park Works. Night and day you could hear the whur-a-whur of steelmaking.

  We saved our money. My mother put the paper bills under the mattress, the coins in a broken coffee pot. She began working steady at Helmstadter’s Department Store. She was a cleanup woman. One day we moved into a little house of our own on Union Street. My mother called it a pigsty but it was her own roof. I fixed the place up. I painted it green with yellow trim. She loved that little house. Union Street, it was all steelworkers. And on that whole street I was the big hero. I was the good son to all those women. Not only to the women. There was this Wojeski, the only man who didn’t bother with a lawn. He grew onions because like he said, “Onions grow any damn place.” This Wojeski would do anything for me. He got me my first job in the mills.

  That was a day. You see things different when you have a new job. It was a day in October. The sky full of black and yellow smoke. Those mills on the river. Why, it was the whole world down there. The blast furnaces wrapped around with pipe. The ore piled up in hills. Red-colored. The tracks, miles and miles of tracks. Was I proud when I showed my brass check at the gate. What was I, all of sixteen? Wojeski had told me where to go but I got lost. A steel mill’s no place to get lost. The cranes screeching, the sparks, all those cauldrons of molten steel. I was blind and deaf. Then I found my way to the pit. That was something. Fire jumping out like some big red hand, the hot slag pouring. Somebody cursed me. Somebody asked me if I was the new man. He was the pit boss. He told me to grab a shovel. I couldn’t see a thing. He hauled me over to the tools. That slag had covered the railroad tracks and they were digging it out. The pit gang. I remember when I shoveled into that slag, the thrill I felt. To be working in a mill like a man.

  That’s how it was. I was the man of the house. All I knew was the family. Food, clothes. Coal for the winter. Doctor bills when my brother got pneumonia. Then my oldest sister Millie got married. For a wedding present we gave them a bedroom we picked out of a window in a furniture store. I guess her conscience bothered her, my poor mother. She said to me, “You ought to find some nice girl, Billy. It’s not fair giving your whole life away to the family.” She said it again when I met this Barbara Natonoski. That girl was a nice girl all right. She was saving herself for the man she married. Divided her body into two parts, she did. “Above water and below,” she used to say. I could kiss her face and neck but that was all. Everything else was below and not for any man except her husband. She was a nice girl like my sister Millie. Millie’s husband was a bookkeeper who worked in the Carnegie plant at Clairton. A white-collar Scotchman, my mother called him. But proud just the same Millie’d done so well. Millie had two years in high school and worked in an office. Both of my sisters were nice girls. Me, I was down in the pit. Nice girls. What did I want with them? I wanted my sister Nellie to find herself a good husband. I wanted my kid brother to go to school. My mother couldn’t do it all by herself. She was down in the pit herself. A woman getting old and working all the time. I was the best son a mother ever had and I’m not bragging. Why the hell brag? You pay for it. You pay for everything you do or don’t do. Aw, that’s enough on McKeesport.

  THE TAPES: 3

  Billy today if you feel like it we could pick up on that phone call from Mr. Kincell.

  A little conniving to balance that good boy stuff. Why didn’t you stop me yesterday?

  I didn’t want to stop you. You gave us some fine colorful copy and that’s what we want today.

  You publication birds. Well, what Art Kincell wanted me for down in Miami was to spring the bad news. That mystery call of his had me worried. But as soon as I l
anded, I began to relax. Art’s car and chauffeur were waiting and there’s nothing like Miami from inside a big car. That’s a town made for a lapdog. We drove out to Union Hall, the place we own down there. Here’s colorful copy for you. Spofford the insurance man built that mansion for his own personal use. He called it Bello Seguro which means Beautiful Insurance if you know your Spanish which a college graduate like you probably knows. Bello Seguro wasn’t right for Art. He had to have something with the dignity of labor. That’s how it got to be Union Hall. But the name that stuck was the Alcoholic Ward, Brass Nuts Hangout. Names like that. That’s your rank and file. They had wages and hours as good as any but what they wanted was to be invited to Miami, too. Why not? Except you go put eight hundred thousand members into thirty-two rooms.

  Now February, the place is packed to the roof. With all kinds of brass. Presidents of locals, lawyers. What the hell not. But that day there was only Art and this Shafer. When I heard that I got real worried. As soon as the chauffeur went for them, I helped myself to a drink at the bar. It’s a big bar. Sixteen feet of solid mahogany, a stuffed swordfish on the wall, a million bottles on the shelves. That was the first time I’d ever hoisted one at that bar all by myself. Now this what I’m going to say about Shafer is confidential.

  Bill, nothing will leave this office without your approval. We’ll edit anything controversial. But let me add that the only way to get dramatic authentic copy is to talk without self-censorship. It will pay public relations dividends, Bill.

  According to the newspapers, this Leo Shafer is a sort of mystery man. Art’s contact man with Congress. But the simple plain truth about this mystery man is this. All his clients’re big corporations. All his pals, labor leaders. Like Art Kincell. Shafer calls his labor relations firm M. and L. Consultants — Management and Labor. What he should do is call it M. and M. Consultants. Get it? Well, when the two of them showed up, Art said we better talk outside the house. He looked bad. All shrunk up in his suit. His big face shrunk up, too, and yellow-looking under the tan. Shafer though, he was cool like always. That was a guy who never sweated blood unless it was somebody else’s. I can see him now in his hula-hula shorts. A thin blond guy who took good care of the two dozen hairs on his head. A little blond pimp of a mustache on his lip. One of those middle-aged slobs so crazy for the women he was always acting half his age. But smart. Nobody’s smarter than these strikebreakers in silk gloves.

  “What’s up?” I asked Art but he didn’t say a word until we were parked under a big umbrella in the garden. Then he said the house might be tapped. He said, “We can’t take any chances.” I wasn’t too surprised. If those Washington snoops could tap the teamsters, the biggest union in the country, nobody was safe. But expecting a thing and getting it tossed in your face are two different babies, brother. Not that I was worried. We were prepared for an investigation. We’d been prepared ever since Beck, the teamster president, was put in jail and the chase after Hoffa. This is all confidential.

  You have my assurances, Bill.

  Get this. I’m not ashamed of anything I’ve ever done. You don’t get to be big without pulling a couple fast ones. That goes for anybody. The president of a bank or the president of a union. A big man is a fast man. That don’t mean you can’t be a straight shooter at the same time. The rank and file never suffered through Billy Lloyd and never will. Well, to cut it short. The bad news Art had was that we were being investigated in September. “If not for Leo here,” he said, “we would have had no warning until the subpoenas were slapped in our face.” — “Art,” I said, “let ‘em slap their God damn subpoenas. Our books are in good order.” He looked at me sad as hell. “Billy,” he said, “they’ve lined up a friendly witness.”

  You guessed it. This was no dozen-for-a-quarter friendly witness you could buy at the supermarket. This was Jim Tooker, one of the big four in the union. He’d been meeting with Committee counsel in Washington, D.C. The d.c. for doublecross. He’d turned them down first but then they’d sold him on a cleanup of corruption job. I tell you I was sick. That Christmas, me and the wife had spent a few days with Jim and his family. Like we’d done for years. We’d go to New York with a bunch of presents. It was a custom we had. We’d gone that Christmas. After the big turkey feed, me and Jim had gone into his den and spoken about our next hunting trip. Two pals. Lifelong pals, and not one single word or hint to me. Talk of your fake Christmases all ringing with bells. Maybe I’m not being fair. He was after Art’s neck. Not mine. That’s what I told myself anyway. He must have an out for me. After all how could he drop any hints to Art’s son-in-law? To get back to Art. All he did was whine. Suppose he had borrowed money from the union treasury, who’d made the union what it was? That was his whine. “What I’ve done for the men, you couldn’t put a cash value on it,” he kept yacking. That whining, though, scared me. Here was a guy who’d always looked on the union as a business where everybody got his share. The biggest share to him and why not? It was his right. He was the biggest man. And here he was whining and cursing Jim for a stool pigeon.

  I felt the same way almost. Labor should fight out its battles inside its own house like a family. Not run to the police station. Jim had always been a pain to Art but in the past we’d kept our fights under the same roof. Now this isn’t for publication, what I’ve told you. And let me tell you, explain how the USTW could have a Jim Tooker and an Art Kincell in the same God damn bed. That’s because the setup is autonomous. The three federations of the USTW are autonomous. Their presidents, Jim Tooker in the East, Roy McHarnish in the West, Harry Holmgren who runs the Midwest federation. They’re all powerhouses. This isn’t for publication. Roy McHarnish is a fake. A company man at heart who likes to pose as a labor statesman. Harry Holmgren’s a good union man and if he’s got his weaknesses who hasn’t. But Jim Tooker. There’s no way to describe that guy. I tried to do it at that God damn trial. But the prosecution wasn’t interested. All they wanted was my neck and headlines for themselves. Let me say this. Jim was the only big shot in the union who’d never been to Union Hall in Miami. He was one of those little pure hearts who gets along with two suits. One for Sundays. A rank and filer, first and last. That’s what we had in common. We were both rank and filers. To get back to Miami. This friendly witness stuff was poison. We didn’t want any Tooker headlines coming out of Washington, D.C.

  Naturally.

  I don’t like the way you say that. Why do so many people expect more from a union than from a business or a bank or Congress? A big union like ours with four hundred locals coast to coast is an empire. Show me anything that big without some dirt in it. You can keep a doll house nice and clean. But not a house with people in it. Anyway, down there in Miami we agreed Jim had to be kept off the singing seat. Art, he saw jail if Jim went ahead and testified. He got me nervous. I’ve been in jails when I was organizing. And you don’t forget. That smell of stone and iron. The talcum on the mugs of the guards. The smell of a bunch of men locked up like rats. You don’t forget. I wanted none of it for me. The strategy we worked out was my baby. To give Jim what he’d always wanted. A second southern organizing drive. An all-out million-dollar drive. Not like the two-bits drive after the war that laid an egg because the idea was for it to lay an egg. That was the only bait that might keep him from being a witness. Like a mink to a woman who’d never owned nothing but a dyed polecat.

  Art wanted me to go up to New York and talk to Jim right away. But I said it’d be better to wait until our hunting trip which was in April. That Shafer bastard saw my reasons. Leave it to him. He said, “Nothing like a heart to heart talk around a campfire.” Talk of words that can eat you alive.

  All this was February. Two nights before Jim and me went off on our trip, Art called on me and Edy. We live out in Georgetown. The papers had the pictures. It’s a nice house me and the wife got. Oh, yeh, Edy knew nothing about the business in Miami or Jim being a friendly witness. Art made up some excuse and we left the house. Outside on the street he spoke wha
t was on his mind. And that was jail. He began mumbling how he was too old for jail. Mumbling all kinds of things. I could hardly hear him. Maybe he didn’t want to hear himself. Then I couldn’t believe it but he said that all a stool pigeon deserved was a bullet, and if he was a hunting man. Something like that. I turned around, I remember, so I could see his face. It was — Well, I’d call it hysterical. Not the way a woman is hysterical, all excited and crying maybe. But the way a man, a pretty tough man can be hysterical. The control is still there but it’s shot just the same. I said, “Art, what did you say?” He didn’t have the guts to repeat it. Just mumbled how he was half crazy, and how all kinds of crazy things popped into his head. Hell, he didn’t have the nerve, the guts, to say that what he wanted was murder.

  Next thing I was on the plane with Jim bound for Seattle and the Aleutians. That was a dream trip for both of us. If you’re a hunter you know what I mean. We’d hunted deer and moose in Maine. But this was the Alaska brown bear. The biggest bear in the world. Jim, he sat there smiling and happy like there was no town called Washington, D.C. I didn’t know him. I’d known him for over twenty years but I didn’t know him. You see a guy all your life, he’s thin or he’s fat, blue-eyed or brown-eyed, and that guy can be a stranger. Jim, he was a thin guy. Nothing remarkable in his face except for his eyes. They were dark brown eyes. Good eyes. And I thought on that plane, Those eyes, what did they see? He was a stranger, this lifelong friend, this friendly witness.