Jun '02 [Home] Short Prose Fire at the Old Factory (from The Slow Pull of Days, a short story collection) Robert Klein Engler 1 An odor of oil and sweat hangs over the factory floor. Lit by cones of suspended lights, the great steel drums of the printing press turn over and over above rollers of tacky black ink. The sound of their rolling is like the sound of locomotives in the night. There is a low, bass vibration that comes up from the floor to your boots and then to your bones and finally into your thoughts. Out one end of the press closest to Bill Klein rolls a seemingly endless stream of paper. Who knows what is being printed tonight: books, catalogs, newspapers; the river of words and pictures goes by so fast it is all a black and white blur. Bill looks up at the gears and rollers. The paper is flowing exactly right now. There are no problems. Soon there will be enough pallets filled with the press run to have the floor hands start loading the warehouse trucks. That's Bill's job. He has to make sure the floor is clean and the run is ready for shipping before the press is stopped and set up for the next job. He looks at his watch. It is eleven-thirty at night. He thinks for a moment of his wife and children. In this room of whines and engine noise it is hard to think, let alone talk. They are all probably asleep by now, he says to himself. On and on, the press rolls. So many words, so many books, so many catalogs. What did I miss, Bill wonders? Who writes about my life, my mother coming penniless from Germany, my brothers, my old job as an iceman? Great wheels are turning. The wife needs a washing machine. The kids want a television set. I hope I can change to the day shift on Monday. The championship fight is on TV next weekend. Maybe I can go over to Earl's and watch it there. Far away, in paneled rooms, men in white shirts talk of war and air raids. Senators debate. These are difficult times. The communists are everywhere. Christmas is coming. 2 A few miles down Archer Avenue, Bill's son is just now turning over in his sleep. As the presses roll, young Robert dreams of great rolling stars, and from those stars roll rivers that seem made more of words than water. How could he tell his father about swimming here, he asks in his dream, all the while his father, sweating now under the heat given off by the great rolling presses, begins to turn in his mind how his life came to this point. How does a man get four kids, a wife, an upstairs flat, and a job that hardly pays for all the bills? It is 1953. The news carries reports about all the scandals that are being uncovered by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Bill wonders what this means. What is wrong with a man being a communist? But there is no time to wonder long. Hank Tumbroso has just reached up and pressed the red stop button. The rollers grind to a halt, slower and slower, like the death spasms of a large, wounded animal. There is silence for a fraction of a second. Then the floor hands rush up to ready the next printing job. There are shouts, the sound of metal hitting metal, the low friction of rollers engaging other rollers, and far away, the bright sound his son hears in a dream where the stars roll like ball bearings in the sky. 3 I am now as old as my father was when he died. I think about my life and his, and wonder how much time I have left to live and how much different I would be if he had lived. I have no children. I never married. Gay men don't have the right to marry other men in America. Nevertheless, I have loved. I do not know if I have made anything out of my love except a few poems. I have written some poems for my father too, but he has never seen them in this world. He has never heard my voice say them. I hardly have an idea of the sound of his voice. I have an old photograph of him. My eyes look like his eyes now. His heart failed. I listen to the beat of my heart. I remember seeing his body on the couch. Now, when I see eleven-year-old boys, I can't help feeling how tender and fragile they are. How could I have stood up then under that shock of my father's death? Look what I missed! My father never taught me how to drive a car. He never saw me as the first person in our family to graduate from college. My father never knew about the lover I had when I was twenty-five, or the other lover who committed suicide. He never knew of the house in the suburbs I bought then sold when love went sour. He never told me secrets about women, or saw me wandering through India looking for gold and ash, looking for some sutra to hold my spirit. I can remember going to just one baseball game with him. That was the year before he died. I can remember him being a stern man, shouting, beating my older brother but doting on my younger sister. Now I am stuck trying to figure out what kind of man he was. I want to have it out with him one time. I want to know why he was my father. I want to know how he made sense of his world. I want to weep for him and the hard work he did. I simply want to love him. 4 The factory where my father used to work, the old Cuneo Press, burnt down a few years ago. It closed some time after he died, then sat idle for years, and later was used to store old tires. When the piles of tires caught fire, after holding themselves in abandonment so long, the building burned for a week. The fire department had to pump water from the river on the smoldering ruins—a deep glow of hot rubber rumbled like indigestion in the old boilers. As I ride by now, I get a glimpse of burnt tires, twisted like charcoal pyramids, piled on the assembly floor. I see the broken windows and bindery walls where thousands of men worked. Time clocks, black lunchboxes with sandwiches wrapped in the frost of waxed paper, smells of ink, sweat, beer—they all return. On the corner you would catch the streetcar down Archer to come home, eat boiled sausage on a white plate, hold your head in your hands, while your elbows dampened the dark wood of our table. You know, Father, for a long time I've been smoldering with your memory; the absence you manufactured has collected like old rubber to fuel the flames over these long years. Why, the other day, as I was tying my shoes, I looked up and thought I saw you seated at the table. I wanted to ask if you found a wisdom I overlooked, for both of us are men now, and I've lived in the world working, making up for my loss. "So, Father," I say, "What think you of my love, my learning, my livelihood? Would you like a drink, is there a water sweet enough to dull the fire of our long farewell?" .OLD MOVIES. Old movies remind me of the antique world my father left by dying. He saw slow, black cars jerk over cobbled streets, bottles of milk resting on shiny oilcloth, iceboxes made of wood. Father was an iceman. He hauled his frozen bulk from wife to widow. A leather shield on his back was always damp with ice melt. After he died, we'd play in the basement with the iron tongs he used. I imagine those tongs today pointed as the ones the devil has to drag scoffing souls off to hell, pointed as the glycerin needle the doctor slid into his heart. But it was too late, no medicine could melt the hold ice had on him. He left us with nothing much, just small change mother used to bundle us off every Saturday to the movies, where, for a quarter, we watched cold heroes flicker with electric fire. (Prior publ.: Zone 3, Winter 1987) Contributor Notes