Evan Hunter - Sons

I told her what I thought of it — we were in a Chinese restaurant on the fringes of Harlem, she did know the city well, I had to give her that. She looked at me solemnly for a moment, and then asked, “What do you know about poetry?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Then how do you know it’s terrible?”

“It doesn’t move me.”

“It moves me,” she said.

“You wrote it,” I said. “Listen, you asked for my opinion, and I gave it to you.”

“I asked for your praise,” she said.

“I thought you wanted my opinion.”

“I don’t need opinions,” she said. “Every cheap critic in the world has an opinion, but only poets have ideas.”

“Excuse me, I didn’t know you were a poet,” I said.

“I’m not "

“Then what are we arguing about?”

“If you love someone, you’re supposed to say her poem is good.”

“Your poem is terrible.”

“Then you don’t love me.”

“Did I say that?”

“Do you love me?” she asked.

The first real contact was made on April 25, when a four-man patrol of the United States 273rd Regiment came upon a Russian outpost at Torgen on the Elbe, two miles west of the advancing American forces.

The bedspread had been quilted by Dolores’ mother. “We shouldn’t be here alone,” she told me, “maybe we’d better go out to a movie or something.”

“We’ve seen everything around,” I said. “We’ve been to twelve movies in the past week, if I never see another movie as long as I live...”

“Then let’s go for a walk.”

“It’s raining,” I said.

“Will...”

“Yes?”

“Don’t do this to me. Please.”

“Do what?” I said.

“If you don’t love me, then please don’t.”

“I never said I didn’t love you.”

“You never said you did, either.”

“Come here.”

“No. Please.”

“Come here, Dolores.”

“Don’t call me that. Please.”

“Lolly? Dec?”

“Please she said. “Please.”

“Come here, Dolores. I won’t touch you. I promise.”

“You will,” she said, and came to the bed.

On April 28, Benito Mussolini was shot to death by partisans in the village of Dongo on Lake Como, together with his mistress Clara Petacci and sixteen Fascist leaders. On the last day of April’s dyings, large and small, Il Duce’s body and that of Signorina Petacci were hung upside down from a steel girder in what had once been a gasoline station. Signs were placed above their bound feet, black-lettered onto white, proclaiming their names to the assembled populace. They were cut down later and taken to the morgue, but only after Mussolini’s head had been kicked to a bloody pulp by a crowd that once had cheered him in life. On that same day, in a bunker below the Reich Chancellery, Adolf Hitler and his mistress Eva Braun committed suicide. The announcement from Berlin read, “At the head of the brave defenders of the Reich capital, the Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler, has fallen. Inspired by a determination to save his people and Europe from destruction by Bolshevism, he has sacrificed his life.”

By that time, I was humping Dolores Prine day and night.

It was shortly after the end of my lunch hour at the mill when a runny-nosed kid came over from Building 17 to tell me that Mr. Moreland in Personnel would like to see me at two o’clock. I told him I’d be there, and then asked if he knew what it was about, but he just shrugged his shoulders and wandered off across the yard with his hands in his pockets. Since it was then a quarter of two, and since the walk to 17 could conceivably take fifteen minutes (if a person had a cork leg) I advised Allen Garrett that I was going up to the executive building, and then put down my picaroon and left the conveyer belt.

Ramsey-Warner, like most paper mills, manufactured several grades of stock, and I had begun to understand during my year’s apprenticeship there that different types of pulp were blended to make those various papers. I guess you could say I was an essential employee in the manufacture of both groundwood and sulphite pulps in that it was I (along with Allen) who spiked the logs off the conveyer belt if we saw any defects in them, it being absolutely necessary for wood to be glistening clean before it was transported to either the chippers or the grinders. Mr. Moreland’s office was in the building behind 12-A, where the big grinders were housed. (All the buildings at the mill were numbered, and I was convinced that Joliet used the same identification system for its cell-blocks. I often wondered if the prison, unlike R-WP, Inc. had a building numbered 13.) On the way to Mr. Moreland’s office, I peeked into 12-A to see what was going on, figuring that if I was ever going to own this place, I had better familiarize myself with every phase of the operation whenever I had the opportunity.

There were twenty grinders in the room, each pair of them flanking a 3000-horsepower motor. If you looked at a grinder from a certain angle, it resembled the front of a locomotive, cylindrical, with a covered drive shaft jutting out of it where the locomotive’s headlight would have been, a metal plate somewhat like a cowcatcher just below it, and a narrow cylinder looking very much like a steam whistle, high up on the right. The first impression lost itself quickly enough in a labyrinth of pipes, dials, valves, and wheels, the clean logs moving on their conveyer belt to be fed into three metal pockets equipped with hydraulic plungers that forced the wood against the huge grindstone revolving inside the machine. The logs were ingested parallel to the face of the twelve-ton stone, the resultant friction against their sides separating the wood fibers and dropping a warm thick soupy pulp into the pit below. That was how the grinder worked. I had asked a hundred questions about it the first time I discovered Building 12-A, standing around and chatting with the guys who operated the machines and took the big empty pockets off the line for refilling whenever their contents had been ground away. One of those guys, a Swede named Bertil Äkeson (our private joke was always the same: “Hello, Bert,” and “Hello, Bert”), greeted me now as I poked my head inside the door. I went over to him, hoping he would be involved in some mysterious operation about which I could ask some casual questions without causing him to think I was after his job. But all we did for five minutes was discuss the wonderful weather we’d been having, and when he finally mentioned something about checking the stone pit temperature gauge, I couldn’t stay around to watch or I’d have been late for my appointment in Building 17.

I had been in Mr. Moreland’s office last April, when he’d hired me, and it seemed to have changed little in the intervening months. His desk, leather-topped walnut, dominated the room, sitting large and cluttered before the twin windows that overlooked the company’s digesters in the yard outside. There were glass-enclosed bookcases on the wall to the left of the entrance door, and three portraits (two of the Ramsey Brothers, Amos and Louis, and a third of Martin Warner) unevenly flanked the fireplace and mantel on the right. The walls were wood-paneled, the carpet was brown, the room was inviting and cozy in contrast to the cheerless gray exteriors of all the buildings at the mill. Mr. Moreland beckoned to the single chair angled before his desk. I sat.

“Tyler,” he said, “do you know how many strikes there were in America last year?”

“No, sir,” I said.