The Cordwainer

by Christopher Blankley

  Chapter Eight

  Horse's Ass

  I'd drunk two beers by the time Fluky pulled up in front of Mitty's place. Mitty climbed in beside me through the passenger's door and instantly began talking about “The Plan”.

  “According to my estimations,” Mitty had a small notebook of coarse hemp paper open in his hand. A page was covered with his jittery, illegible, spider-like scrawl. “A crate of boots, as prepared on a production line of The Shop, contains a thousand pairs of boots.”

  “Eight hundred,” I corrected, reaching back behind Fluky to find Mitty a beer. At least that much I had learned that day.

  “Ah, that complicates things...” Mitty said, pulling a stub of a pencil out of his shirt pocket. “Oh, thank you,” he said distractedly as I handed him a beer.

  Fluky put the truck in gear and started us rolling down the hill towards Pottersville. Mitty recalculated his figures, intermittently pausing to take a sip of his beer. The sun was setting breathtakingly over the mountains as we motored down the hill into the old ghost town. We sat in silence as Mitty concentrated.

  I looked at Barry's watch. I was already late for dinner with Dad. There'd be hell to pay, but I wasn't worried. I just couldn't face another second of pretending. I didn't want to think about the day I'd had at work. I didn't want to think about anything.

  “Correction,” Mitty finally spoke. “A crate of boots, as produced at The Shop, contains eight hundred pairs of boots. A standard Concession mega-gauge boxcar is sixty-four feet by thirteen and half feet by ten feet in dimensions. That works out to forty-eight crates per boxcar, or thirty-eight thousand, four hundred pairs of boots per boxcar.” Not bad for a dummy. “If, as Beanie reports, a pair of boots is selling, west of the mountains, for as much as one hundred dollars a pair, that's a little under four million dollars for a single boxcar of boots.”

  “Four fuckin' million?” Fluky exclaimed.

  “These are just back-of-the-envelope figures, you understand, but I think my mathematics are correct.”

  “Shit, them Concession bums are crooks.” Fluky spat.

  “That's black-market prices,” I corrected, “the Concession doesn't sell them for anything like that. Two bucks and change last time I actually saw a pair of boots for sale.”

  “Yeah, well, still...” Fluky grumbled.

  “And you can pick numbers out of the air all you want,” I reached over and shut Mitty's notebook for him. “They're just that: numbers. We ain't got a box car and we ain't got a crate of boots and we ain't got a way to get even a single pair of boots across the mountains. So you can dream and talk and drink beer all you want, but we ain't any closer to four million bucks scribbling it down in a notebook than we'd be not scribbling it down.”

  I finished my beer and crumpled up the carton, throwing it out the rear window.

  The cab of Fluky's old wrecking truck fell quiet.

  I opened another beer. With two large scotches and three beers in my belly, my head was swimming. Any guilt, any pain I might have been feeling was well and truly lost under all the booze. Acrimony, however, I still had front and foremost. Mitty and his stupid ideas. It annoyed me just to hear him talk. What an idiot! A boxcar full of boots across the mountains... The fool! There was so much wrong with the whole idea there wasn't much left that could be right about it.

  “Well, we have this truck,” Mitty said softly, reopening his notebook to a clean page. “It has a towing capacity of, what? Four tons?” He was writing with the ridiculously small pencil. “And a pair of boots weighs...”

  I grabbed the pencil from his fat hand and unceremoniously tossed it out of the passenger's side window. Mitty turned to me and gave me an expression of shocked horror. I gave him such a murderous glare that he said nothing. He simply closed his notebook and returned it to his shirt pocket.

  “There ain't even anything like enough diesel in Boot Hill to haul just us-all across the mountains, to say nothin' of no cargo of boots,” Fluky continued, watching the road, having not seen my little exchange with Mitty. “Old Man Zimmerman gets a ration for this here truck, but that just for salvagin'. Cleanin' up the town. All them old cars in old driveways just rustin' up. That ain't good for the environment. Someone's got to haul them off.”

  “I cannot stomach the sentiment that this enterprise is impossible,” Mitty said, emptying his beer. He reached back behind through the rear window and came back with a fresh one. “The Concession rails run directly from here straight into the Big City. It's a three-hour journey.”

  “Concession rails and Concession trains,” I said as the truck was rolling into downtown Pottersville. The sun was below the mountains now, and the eerie silence of the ghost town was intensified by the dark. “Concession cargo and Concession rolling stock. Can you think of anything that ain't owned by the Concession, Mitty?” I asked.

  Mitty shrugged.

  Fluky brought the truck to a halt in the square in front of the old Union Station. He killed the engine and it coughed unhappily to a drawn-out halt. We disembarked from the truck and stretched our legs, Mitty and Fluky searching around the cobblestones for some good throwing rocks. But I wasn't in the mood for breaking glass. I finished my beer and walked up the front steps of the old station. For the first time in my life, instead of entertaining myself with mindless destruction, I decided to open one of the the massive oak doors that fronted the derelict building, and I stepped inside.

  The main concourse of the station, with its grand arched ceiling and sturdy, marble columns, was littered with broken glass, rocks and other debris. Evidence of animal and human habitation was all around. Many of the benches on which passengers had once waited for trains were splintered and smashed. It appeared, long ago, there'd been a large bonfire set in the center of the floor.

  I wasn't sure what I was looking for, if I was looking for anything at all. I kicked over a bench and tried to pull a plank free from it, only to be impressed by the solid nature of its construction. I'd need an ax. I gave up on that and went to explore deeper in the station.

  “...I mean, with four million dollars on the table,” Mitty's voice echoed through the cavernous hall, continuing a conversation, as he and Fluky followed me into the station. “We should at least give the scheme a little effort.”

  “For four million bucks, we should hijack ourselves one of them Concession trains,” Fluky laughed. “For that kinda green, I wouldn't be opposed to a little thievin'.”

  “What I was suggesting was legitimate commerce,” Mitty's voice echoed, “not larceny.”

  Fluky laughed again. “I was just funnin' you, Mitty.”

  “Yes, quite,” Mitty answered, concern still in his voice.

  The two of them were across the concourse, picking their way down the large, marble stairs. I was standing in front of an old ticket counter, looking up at an automated timetable board listing trains and their destinations on routes that had not run for over thirty years.

  And that's when the lights switched on.

  Not literally – in my head. I suddenly saw the universe in a whole new light.

  “Say, where'd they used to run trains from this station to?” I yelled out, my voice bouncing back at me off the marble walls. I was looking up at the timetable at an entry for a 3:15 to Seattle.

  “Well, the Northern Pacific Railroad famously ran stock from Saint Paul to Tacoma,” Mitty began. He and Fluky turned to see what I was looking at, and the realization of what I was driving at visibly passed over their faces. “Oh,” Mitty said, looking up at the table.

  “Shee-it,” Fluky said and spat on the floor.

  Suddenly we were a whole lot closer to that four million dollars.

  The three of us stood there looking up at the ancient, dusty old board. We were all mentally processing the full implications of what we were looking at. I felt a little bit not unlike a fool. It had never occurred to me that there might be another railroad that crossed the mountains. Perhaps that was the greatest feat ever perf
ormed by the Concession: They never had to act to protect their monopoly, everyone simply took them for granted. Like an immutable law of physics. The Concession owned everything – there was no commerce outside of the authorized and approved business of the Concession. They had us by the hearts and mind and therefore had us all by the balls.

  But right up there in front of us was the evidence that the Concession had not always ruled the roost. Long ago, once upon a time, there had been commerce outside of the aegis of the Concession.

  “We is gonna get rich!” Fluky put into words what we were all thinking.

  “Bully!” Mitty agreed.

  “It still can't...” I stammered. Answering one question had created a legion of new ones in my mind. Would the track still be usable? Was there track still at all? Did it truly stretch all the way to the Big City? It had, thirty years ago, but thirty years was thirty years. Where precisely did it pass through the mountains? “There's just no way,” but I could not peel my eyes away from the dusty old timetable.

  Fluky and Mitty had no intentions of simply pondering the questions. Behind me I heard feet scuffling through the detritus across the concourse floor. They were moving, as quickly as was safely possible, towards the platforms. I spun and picked out a path, attempting to follow. If the track was still there – I could hardly dare to wish it – then there was a real chance. By the appearance of everything, Pottersville had simply been abandoned. There was no reason to think that the old Northern Pacific hadn't been similarly forgotten.

  Fluky whooped in joy as he sprinted out onto the platform. He leapt down onto the tracks, between the rusty old rails, and rapped on one with his balled fist. It rang solid. He skipped, jumping from tie to tie for a few yards down the track. He whooped again and tossed his cap into the night air.

  “Hell! We's going to be rich!” he yelled into the darkness.

  “Bully!” Mitty repeated next to me, still up on the platform. He puffed on his Jefferson and nodded approvingly. Mitty liked what he saw.

  I went back to Fluky's truck, ostensibly to grab a celebratory beer for everyone, but in reality to let my head clear a little. Suddenly the impossible had become disturbingly possible. I half didn't believe what we'd stumbled upon: A realistic and serviceable method to smuggle boots from Boot Hill to the Big City.

  Of course, like all great ideas, the first question to pop into your head is why hadn't anyone thought of it before? Perhaps they had, and there was some simple but impassible obstacle that we were not yet seeing. But I was able to answer that question for myself before I'd even fished the case of beer out of the truck: Tracks were one thing – even if they did actually stretch all the way to the Big City – a train was another.

  The intractable problem, as with the shortages themselves, was power.

  Producing power meant burning carbon. Burning carbon meant contributing to global overheating. The production of power was tightly controlled by the government, to save us all from melting away along with the polar icecaps. We might have found a path by which we could cross the mountains, but we were no closer to possessing the power with which to surmount such an obstacle.

  Mitty and Fluky had come to the same conclusion by the time I returned with the beer.

  “Perhaps you were correct before,” Mitty was saying to Fluky as I handed out the cartons of Frau. They were both sitting on the edge of the platform, their feet dangling down over the tracks. “If we had access to a Concession train...”

  “Nope, no good,” Fluky replied, opening his beer. “That right there, that's Stephenson gauge,” Fluky gestured with his Frau at the tracks below him. “56.5 inches. All that Concession stock, that's mega-gauge: 78.75 inches.” Fluky burped. “Not gonna fit.”

  I was impressed. But mechanical know-how had always been Fluky's specialty. I dropped down on to the edge of the platform next to them and opened my beer.

  “What the deuce?” Mitty replied. “That's hardly to be believed.”

  “Still, there it be...” Fluky said distantly.

  “Why 78.75 inches?” I asked. It was a queer figure.

  “Two hundred centimeters,” Fluky answered. “It's all metric now-a-days. Now 56.5... That there is a tall tale.” Fluky snorted.

  “What?” I asked over my beer.

  “Well, see,” Fluky began solemnly. He always loved to tell a tale. “Them tracks right there, they got themselves a long pedigree. You see there was this fella, Stephenson, over in England that invented the steam engine – he's the fella the gauge is named for. He invented his engine to pull stock, that before he thought up his engine, was being pulled by horses. And you know the thing about a horse's ass? It's 'bout yay big.” he held his hands about two feet apart. “Get yourself a pair of horse's asses and what you got? 'Bout 56.5 inches.” He paused to let the gravity of that observation sink in.

  “Bullshit,” Mitty observed.

  “Well, horse shit, yeah,” Fluky continued undaunted. “Guess they gone and found ruts in Roman roads back there in England dating back two thousand years where the ruts are exactly 56.5 inches apart. Roman chariots, I deduce, had the same track spacin' as that there Stephenson railway. And you know what else?” Fluky nudged me knowingly.

  “No, what?” I said dutifully.

  “'Bout the time old Henry Ford gets around to inventin' the automobile, he's got to run them down roads that been carrying horse-drawn wagons for years. You wanta guess how far the wheels turned out to be on the Model T? That's right,” Fluky said with self satisfaction. “56.5 inches.”

  “Oh, I've never heard such garbage,” Mitty scolded.

  “Swear to God!” Fluky raised a hand in oath.

  “Happenstance,” Mitty said stoically. “Everything in your vignette can easily be explained by coincidence.”

  “Coincidence?!” Fluky sounded hurt. “That there's the God's honest truth!”

  “Fortuity,” Mitty said dismissively.

  “Why, you tartar-headed son-of-a-bitch-” Fluky was about to pull himself up to his feet when I interrupted.

  “So, you're saying you can drive a car on these tracks?” I asked, pulling Fluky back down to sit on the platform. He was shooting daggers from his eyes at Mitty, but slowly my questions penetrated his brain.

  “Hell, yeah!” He said, changing moods. “Well, not all cars and trucks are as thin as the Model T, and road tires ain't gonna do you a damn bit of good; but yeah... Slap on a set of train wheels and you got yourself a four-door locomotive with rack and pinion steerin'.”

  I was silent. I just looked at Fluky with half a grin. It hadn't clicked for him. He emptied his Frau and reached back to open up another carton. He took a sip of the fresh one and turned back to me. I was still staring at him, my lips ever so slightly curled.

  “What?” he asked, looking at me like I was crazy.

  “No!” Mitty suddenly exclaimed from behind Fluky. He'd gotten it.

  “Oh, hell, no!” It hit Fluky like a wave.

  We were all at once up on our feet and running; back out through the concourse to where we'd parked Fluky's truck.

  Sure enough, after we'd driven the wrecking truck around the station and spent a few minutes lining it up just so on the tracks, we had Fluky's truck balanced uncomfortably on top of the two Stephenson gauge rails. It wasn't perfect – the old 1952 International Harvester was a lot wider than a Model T – but the tires sat precariously perched on their inner edges, with the width of the tracks well within the wheel wells. It could be done, we realized. With some modifications, a standard-sized truck like Fluky's could be made to ride on the Stephenson gauge rails like a train.

  After we were finished with our experiment, we returned to our perch on the train platform, popping the corners on the last three Fraus in the case.

  “Forgive me,” Mitty began after a long silence. All of us were staring at Fluky's truck sitting on the rails. “What have we learned here? We can drive the wrecker on these Stephenson gauge rails. But how is that gett
ing us any nearer to our goal? Isn't running the wrecker that many miles still prohibitively expensive? If enough diesel could successfully be procured.”

  Neither Fluky nor I answered. We just sat in silence and stared at the truck.

  “I mean, I know I am – officially – not the sharpest knife in the drawer, but if I'm missing something...”

  Carbon.

  It was all about carbon.

  We were one more hurdle along in our steeple chase. Tracks right in front of us, and a train. Even without saying a word I knew what Fluky was thinking. We sat in the darkness of Pottersville drinking our beer and contemplating the last obstacle that needed to be navigated if we were ever going to see our plan become a reality. And this one was a whopper – an obstacle bigger than all those other obstacles combined. But we were so close to it, everyone could almost taste it. That four million dollars in Mitty's notebook was quite an incentive. There just had to be a way, there just had to be.

  Carbon.

  Mitty was right. Despite his IQ, he could see the massive obstruction that still presented itself. We might have a track, we might have a train, but we still lacked an engine. The Big City and four million dollars were still just as far out of our grasp as they had been at the start of the evening. We'd been clever, very clever, and if only there was an engine that ran on wits. But what we needed was power, and power meant fuel, and fuel meant carbon.

  And there all our cleverness could do us no good. There simply wasn't any carbon set aside for the likes of Mitty, Fluky and me.

  Not us and a load of old boots.