The Cordwainer

by Christopher Blankley

  Chapter Nine

  H2O2

  The horse-drawn milk wagon was lumbering slowly down the street as I made my way home. Fluky had dropped me at the corner on Roosevelt so as not to wake anyone on the street with his engine, and I hoped I could sneak back into the house without disturbing my father.

  I was uncomfortably sober and the sun was beginning to rise in the west. Fluky, Mitty and I had spent the rest of the night out in Pottersville, tossing around ideas, trying to get ourselves at least one step closer to a working idea of how we were going to power our locomotive. We'd come up dry. We'd discovered the unused Stephenson gauge tracks; Fluky could construct serviceable rolling stock from the almost infinite supply of rusted and forgotten automobiles salvaged at Zimmerman's yard; acquiring cargo for our trip would be laughably easy; but an engine... There was just no engine that could possibly be constructed that didn't require fuel we didn't have access to.

  And then there was the whole moral aspect to it, as well. Fluky had suggested the perfectly workable idea of burning the dry timber that constituted the venerable buildings of old Pottersville until we reached the high timber of the mountains. There we could cut what fuel we needed to power ourselves over and through the pass. It would work. I could design and Fluky could construct a simple external combustion engine, but the byproduct: Carbon dioxide.

  We were, after all, motivated entirely by greed. We could make noise about duty, and taking it upon ourselves to attempt to alleviate some of the suffering caused by the shortages, but it was all so much steaming horse shit. We wanted to get a cargo of boots across the mountains so we could sell it at a profit. We all wanted to be rich. The idea of four million dollars was quite a carrot hung out in front of our noses. Barry's watch around my wrist and the prospect of another day working on the floor of The Shop was quite a stick whacking me in the ass. It was plain and simple greed – there was no other word for it.

  Now, greed in itself was nothing I objected to. Nothing wrong with a little enlightened self interest. But could we, in good conscience, make the rest of the world suffer from our greediness? Some folks would get some boots that they otherwise might not, but the whole planet... How many degrees were we comfortable overheating the planet to line our pockets with gold?

  The sun had almost fully risen by the time I opened the front door of my father's house. To have expected that I could just sneak back in, at that hour, was foolish. I walked through the hall and passed the kitchen where my father was sitting with the morning paper, sipping his coffee.

  “Andrew,” he said, not looking up as I stood in the kitchen doorway.

  “Dad,” I answered.

  “Fifteen minutes or we'll miss the trolley,” he said, and left it at that. I went to my room and changed out of my clothes, back into my shirt and tie and old coat. I met my father by the front door, where he stood with our lunch pails prepared. He handed me mine and a mug full of coffee.

  Up until that moment, I'd managed to survive all my life without coffee. All my years growing up, all those all-nighters pulled before a big exam in college, I'd managed to get by without ever needing the pick-me-up of a cup of coffee. But I was about to start the second day of my professional career without a dinner the night before, no breakfast, a belly full of whiskey and beer, and not even ten minutes of sleep. I took the cup of coffee and drank it down in a series of thirsty gulps. It tasted vile, but I choked it down. I handed back the mug and my father put it down on a small table beside the front door. He stepped out and I followed, walking back up the street towards Roosevelt.

  Later in my life, after I finally gave up the booze, coffee would come to replace it as my overwhelming addiction. I think back to that first cup of coffee and how seriously it gave me the jitters. If I'd only known, I'd have turned the offered cup down. But the caffeine hitting my system had its intended effect. I was awake and alert as I boarded the trolley, wordlessly, with my father. I could feel my father's seething bubbling just below his skin, but I dared not poke at it. Even an apology might have set him off.

  My second day of work proceeded to unfold very much the same as my first. I watched the Worker B's beavering away on Line Number Six and ticked off my boxes as the crates at the end of the line filled with boots.

  But the effect of the coffee quickly began to wear off and I was soon overcome by the full weariness my night out in Pottersville had earned me. I found a stool and perched myself upon it, fighting desperately the desire to sneak off and lay down for half an hour.

  Eventually, I simply had to get up and move. Watching the repetitive motions of the Worker B's building footwear was hypnotizing, I just couldn't watch it. I took the opportunity to explore around the floor of The Shop a little, scouting around. I was acutely aware that my presence was not required at my station for my subordinates to do their jobs. If I wandered off for ten minutes or ten hours, I knew the output of The Shop would not be affected in the slightest.

  Pottersville and the Northern Pacific, Stephenson gauge and horse's asses. It was all bounding around in my sleep-deprived brain. I could feel, almost taste, a solution to the power problem just at the periphery of my comprehension. If I could only concentrate, I was thinking, I could put the idea squarely into view. But my mind was too tired to get a handle on anything. The riddle of Mitty's Plan broke down to just another four-boxed form. One, get boots. Check. Two, find tracks. Check. Three, build train. Check. Four... That was the box I just couldn't check: Build an engine. There had to be an engine – some sort of engine – to carry Mitty, Fluky, myself and a cargo of boots across the mountains. If I was only just a little bit smarter, if I could only just get a little sleep.

  I walked across the main floor of The Shop and took a large corridor that connected the primary structure with one of its annexes. I was heading nowhere in particular, just following my nose. In this case, “following my nose” turned out to be literal. As I walked the length of the corridor connecting the two buildings I became aware of a definite odor. I couldn't place it. Something akin to rotting flesh and lye. Thankfully, the odor was hardly noticeable on the main floor, but as I stepped into the annex building, the aroma quickly became overpowering.

  There were large vats here, and men in white overalls wearing masks. A catwalk circled the walls and I climbed a nearby ladder to get a look down into the vats. Up there the fumes were even more intense and they began to burn at my nose and throat. But I got a look down into the large swirling vats of... well, I could only guess – some caustic liquid. Large bolts of hemp were being unfurled beside the tanks and submerged in the clear, stinking broth. The men with the overalls and masks were patting down the sheets of hemp and making sure the cloth was well and truly soaked. In one vat near the far wall of the annex, two men were attaching hooks and lifting out a thoroughly soaked sheet of hemp and pulling it into the air to dry on pulleys. The sheet had turned white, from its natural mud brown, with a slight pinkish hue.

  I suddenly realized what fluid was below me in the vat.

  “Mask!” came a muffled yell from along the catwalk. I looked up and saw a masked man waving at my angrily. “Mask!” he yelled again, and pointed repeatedly at a sign hanging from a support beam. It showed an icon of a man coughing and another of a man breathing comfortably behind a clean gas mask.

  I got the hint, as if I needed one, and started to descend the catwalk. My eyes were watering and the burning sensation in my mouth made me want to spit. I couldn't get out of that foul annex fast enough, but I'd seen everything I needed to see.

  Back on the main floor I found a seat on an empty crate and paused to catch my breath. I wiped the tears from my eyes with the end of my tie and spat a mouthfull of bile behind the crate as discreetly as I could manage.

  Hydrogen peroxide. Strong stuff, I could tell by my level of irritation. Hydrogen peroxide was an excellent bleaching agent. Hemp was naturally an unattractive brown color. With hemp the predominant cash crop in the United States, and the hinterland
s surrounding Boot Hill prodigious producers of it, hemp was essentially the only material available to The Shop from which to fabricate its boots. This required hemp to wear many hats, so to speak: cotton, wool, faux-leather. Over the years, The Shop had gotten pretty good at making silk out of the proverbial sow's ear. I had a pair of cowboy boots back home that you couldn't tell apart from real snake skin. But the whole process required many steps of dying, rendering, forming and stretching. Dying the hemp white was an understandable and obligatory first step.

  And very well suited to my needs.

  I looked down at the clipboard in my hands and examined the four-boxed form as I struggled for my breath. Four boxes and four steps. I had three checked off and only one more to go. Hydrogen peroxide. The words rattled around in the recesses of my memory. What was hydrogen peroxide, other than a bleaching agent?

  I flipped over the topmost form and began scribbling frantically on its back with my pencil. Before I was fully aware of what I was doing, the schematics for an engine were already on the paper in front of me. Hydrogen peroxide, H2O2, besides being a strong bleaching agent, was also – I could recall from a fourth-year seminar – a powerful rocket fuel. That in itself was of little usage to Mitty's Plan. It wasn't like we were going to ride a rocket over the mountains. But I recalled exactly how hydrogen peroxide worked as a rocket fuel: Exposed to a catalyzing agent, it decomposed, exothermically, into water and oxygen. H2O and O2. So exothermically, in fact, that the water was inevitably produced as steam.

  And what use was steam? Oh God, all the use in the world! I could hardly contain my excitement. Steam was for running steam engines. Right in the annex – right behind me in massive vats that could drown an elephant – was my fuel. Fuel to make power, power to pull a train over a mountain, over a mountain and to a Big City as ripe and ready to be plucked as any apple ever to grow on any tree!

  And not an ounce of carbon in any of it! Hydrogen peroxide in, water and oxygen out. Clean, sweet, wonderful water! Fresh as they day that it fell from the sky. No carbon dioxide, no global overheating, no moral angle to the enterprise at all!

  I'd found it! I'd found my engine.

  All the rest of the world faded away as I sat there etching out my schematic. My hangover, the lack of sleep, my empty belly didn't bother me. Nothing would stop me until I had finished my task. Twenty minutes passed as I covered the back of the whole sheet with my design.

  That's not entirely true: The design wasn't really mine, I didn't invent a four-stroke, tandem compound, dual-stage piston steam engine. They'd been in use for over a century, and it was a design I could re-create from my studies from memory. And I still feel, to this day, that the design was a sound application of hydrogen peroxide as a monopropellant. What happened in Pottersville – what almost derailed Mitty's Plan before it had even really begun – were design errors outside of and additional to the fundamental working of my engine. I had no experience with hydrogen peroxide as a fuel source, I doubt there was anyone alive in 1973 who really did, and the explosion... Well, I'm getting ahead of myself.

  When I was through with my schematic, I jumped to my feet and almost cheered in joy. I expected a round of applause from the surrounding factory, so monumental I felt my accomplishment had been. But the work of The Shop went on uninterrupted around me, oblivious to my self-evident genius. Worker B's were working away at boots at their stations; bending, fitting and stitching. A pang of isolation hit me as I looked at the design in my hand. I folded it in half three times and tucked it away in my shirt pocket. I had neglected my station at number six production line long enough.

  I passed the rest of my day dutifully completing my work as instructed. Crates came off the end of my production line and I soberly inspected each for compliance with my four-boxed form. Having found the crate complete and correct, my four boxes fearlessly marked, I signed each form and attached it to its crate with a small staple gun. It was then the job of a small army of heavy-shouldered porters to seal each crate and cart it off on a dolly for who-knows-where. Beside the road leading from town to the factory, I guessed, for very few boots made in The Shop ever made it much farther.

  When the whistle blew at the end of the day, I could barely keep myself from sprinting for the break room. Jacket and lunch pail in hand, I waited impatiently for my father. He appeared, eventually, walking and talking with a clutch of other Foremen, laughing and making plans. I had to remind him three times that the trolley would not wait for him to finish his conversation. Eventually my father had gathered his coat and lunch pail and we were on the trolley heading back to town.

  “You seemed to have held together well,” my father said when we'd found a seat and he'd had a chance to look me over. I was tapping my foot irritably, but otherwise awake and alert.

  “Second wind,” I commented.

  “Good,” he said with satisfaction. “I don't approve – I've spoken to you before. But after last night, to be able to stand to a full day on the floor... I'm impressed.”

  I didn't want to get into it with him, to insult his chosen profession, to suggest that I could have slept half the day and still got my job done. It wasn't the time or place – there'd never be a time or place. Now that I could see light at the end of the tunnel, now that I had four boxes on my Mitty's Plan form ticked off, I didn't need to lose any sleep over what a dead-ended life my father had lived. That I didn't have to live it, that it had given me the education and brains to find another way, was all that mattered. I could never attack my father for living his life. He was happy in it.

  “I have to go out again, before dinner,” was all I said. “To see Fluky.”

  “No!” my father quickly commanded. “Not two nights in a row!”

  “No, no, not like last night. I'll be back for dinner.”

  “Son-” he began, but stopped himself.

  “I swear!” I pleaded. I'm not sure why I thought I needed to ask permission. Old habits die hard.

  We rode the rest of the way home in silence.

  At home I changed and rang Fluky's parents' home. His mother informed me that he wasn't home, that he hadn't returned yet from work, but that many Tuesdays he played cards in the back room at Putter's and today being Tuesday... Putter's was downtown, on Main, and a good half an hour's walk each way. I'd never be able to make it there and back by dinner. Trolley service was always spotty at this hour, with runs still bringing workers back from The Shop. I'd have to run, I realized, and then there was always the chance that Fluky wouldn't be there. He could have been at any one of a dozen Tuesday night card schools that met in town. But I'd have to chance it.

  I'd moved the four-boxed form with my schematic on the back from my work shirt to the pocket of my jeans. I had to show it to Fluky – show him what I had produced. Mitty, I knew, would be unimpressed. Solutions always presented themselves to Mitty; someone else always arrived, at the eleventh hour, to pull his bacon from the fire. If I told him we'd be riding a rocket over the mountains and landing in Pioneer Square, he wouldn't have batted an eye. Trains, engines, facts and figures, they were all someone else's problem.

  But Fluky would comprehend the enormity of what I had created. In the world of achievable things, this was where Fluky resided. If I could explain to him my design, if I could show him that conquering the mountains between Boot Hill and the Big City was an achievable goal – with his mechanical expertise and my designs – then we could really do this. We could really get cargo across the mountains and to market on the other side, completely circumventing the Concession and its monopoly. If we could do it once, we'd be wealthy, but if we could make the trip multiple times...

  The horsepower of the engine I had down on that sheet of paper was nothing like that of one of the Concession's behemoths. There'd be no five-mile long trains on our railroad. But even just one crate, the product of two hours on my very own production line, would net us... What? Fifty thousand dollars? And my engine could haul fifty crates, at least.

 
All that money... it was all right there on the back of that four-boxed form. I had to show it to Fluky. I had to make him understand.